Quality, Warranty and Preventive Maintenance examines the impact of
product quality on warranty and maintenance costs and strategies, from
the perspectives of both manufacturers and users. In addition, the
theories of warranty and preventive maintenance are introduced and
discussed. Common wisdom supports the notion that better product quality
means lower warranty costs for the manufacturer, and lower maintenance
costs for the users of a manufactured product. This proposition is
examined in some detail on the basis of failure time models. The authors
investigate what exactly better quality means in warranty and
maintenance management, and how it impacts warranty policies and costs
for the manufacturer, and replacement and maintenance strategies and
costs for the users. In measuring quality improvement, the main concepts
and tools used are those of stochastic ordering and mixture models. The
theoretical base of the work is a time-varying failure-rectification
process. This process includes, as special cases, replacement, minimal
repair, and imperfect repair, as alternative rectification modes that
may be available to the manufacturer or the user in warranty-servicing
or maintaining a product. In addition to serving as a unifying base for
the entire monograph, the use of this process enables one to investigate
jointly optimal repair-effort/warranty-policy and
repair-effort/maintenance-strategy configurations for repairable
units.
This book should be of interest to researchers in industry and academia,
and to quality, warranty and maintenance professionals, specialists, and
managers with a technical background. It is suitable as a textbook to
support graduate-level seminar courses in OR/MS, IE and business
administration curricula.
