Soft reliability, a new class of problems for innovative products: "how to approach them"

Geudens, W.H.J.M.; Sonnemans, P.J.M.; Petkova, V.T.; Brombacher, Aarnout

doi:10.1109/rams.2005.1408391

Cited by 11 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 1 publication

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“…Consumers from different adopter categories (innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards 11 ) are expected to have different expectations and needs regarding the product 34 . During the buying decision, consumers evaluate the so-called 'relative advantage' of a product compared with existing (already owned) products 11 , i.e.…”

Section: Expectations Of Consumersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quality and Reliability Problems from a Consumer's Perspective: an Increasing Problem Overlooked by Businesses?

Ouden

Yuan

Sonnemans

et al. 2006

Qual. Reliab. Engng. Int.

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Currently, many businesses in the consumer electronics industry are facing an increasing number of consumer complaints, despite the application of quality tools that proved to be very powerful in the past. We assessed over 20 new product development projects, to understand the reasons behind the rising number of consumer complaints. We found that businesses are developing more innovative products that are brought to the market faster, with inherently higher uncertainties on the consumer expectations of these products. Current analyses of consumer complaints solely focus on checking if the product is functioning according to the technical specification, and these analyses show a rising number of consumer complaints where no failure could be established. When looking at product quality and reliability from a consumer's perspective, we found that consumers complain not only about technical product failures but also when the product does not satisfy their expectations. In this paper we will take the perspective of the consumer to analyse dissatisfaction with new products from various available sources, which were not set-up for quality and reliability purposes. We will show that analysing information from these sources gives better information, especially on the non-technical failures compared with the traditional quality and reliability sources.

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Section: Expectations Of Consumersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quality and Reliability Problems from a Consumer's Perspective: an Increasing Problem Overlooked by Businesses?

Ouden

Yuan

Sonnemans

et al. 2006

Qual. Reliab. Engng. Int.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The end result is many 'product assistance' calls at call centers, 'No Fault Found' labeled products at service/repair centers, returned products at dealers that function well, and to top it all, disconfirmed expectations of unhappy customers yielding damaged brand image of companies. The realization of this trend (Figure 1) was the starting point for making a distinction between hard versus soft reliability concerns 1,2,4,7 .…”

Section: Background On Soft Reliabilitymentioning

confidence: 95%

Soft reliability: an interdisciplinary approach with a user–system focus

Koca

Funk

Karapanos

et al. 2008

Quality & Reliability Eng

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A recent trend in technological innovation is towards the development of increasingly multifunctional and complex products to be used within rich socio-cultural contexts such as the high-end office, the digital home, and professional or personal healthcare. One important consequence of the development of strongly innovative products is a growing market uncertainty regarding 'if', 'how', and 'when' users can and will adopt such products. Often, it is not even clear to what extent these products are understood and interacted with in the intended manner. The mentioned problems have already become an evident concern in the field, where there is a significant rise in the numbers of seemingly sound products being complained about, signaling a lack of soft reliability. In this paper, we position soft reliability as a growing and critical industrial problem, whose solution requires new academic expertise from various disciplines. We illustrate potential root causes for soft reliability problems, such as discrepancy between the perceptions of users and designers. We discuss the necessary approach to effectively capture subjective feedback data from actual users, e.g. when they contact call centers. Furthermore, we present a novel observation and analysis approach that enables insight into actual product usage, and outline opportunities for combining such objective data with the subjective feedback provided by users.

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“…Despite numerous measures, accidents keep occurring (Körvers & Sonnemans, 2008). Research continues searching for better safety indicators, since safety depends on numerous factors, similar to equipment reliability and equipment use (see for example, , Geudens, Sonnemans, Brombacher, & Petkova 2005. Following the vapour cloud explosion accident at the BP refinery in Texas City in March 2005 the Center for Process Safety of AIChE in New York has put much effort to develop a set of process safety metrics (CCPS, 2009).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%