In innovative fast product development processes, such as consumer electronics, it is necessary to check as quickly as possible, using field data, whether the product reliability is at the right level. In consumer electronics, some major companies use the Warranty Call Rate (WCR) for this purpose. This paper discusses extensively the theoretical and practical drawbacks of the WCR. Subsequently, it is demonstrated, using a Weibull failure distribution, that only a few months after product launch, say three months, the warranty data offer the opportunity to estimate the parameters of the failure distribution. Of course, this requires that the warranty data are available in the quality department. Unfortunately, for some companies the field feedback information process from the repair centres to the quality department causes a delay of several months. These companies have to speed up their field feedback information process before they can fully take advantage of the proposed estimation procedure.

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The increasing need for products that are able to reliably deliver complex functionality with a high degree of innovation presents a major challenge to the modern day product creation processes. In order to be able to use information on the field behaviour of previous products in the design of new products, increasingly detailed information needs to be retrieved from the market in an increasingly shorter time. The purpose of this study is to analyse, in a typical case in the consumer electronics industry, whether the underlying business process is able to generate this information with adequate quality sufficiently quickly. Information models of the company's service centre and call centre were developed using the concepts of maturity index on reliability. The results showed that the structure of the information handling process resulted in a massive data loss (up to 60% of the data gathered by the service centres) and also in serious data quality degradation. Would this information have not been lost, it could have been used by development teams for preventive and corrective actions.

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