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Designing in failure Posted by Ari [Email]  (#2847) [Profile/Gallery]
(more from Ari) on Tue, 17 Jun 2003 05:30:16
In Reply to: Re: Having been in Design and now in Quality....(long)., MJP, Mon, 16 Jun 2003 15:50:47 Members do not see ads below this line. - Help Keep This Site Online - Signup |
I can't say it doesn't happen, but there's very little good reason to design in failures to increase aftermarket part revenue.
The trouble with designing in failure is that it's hard enough to make parts last a long time; making them last just the 'right' time is very hard and risky. Why risky?
If parts fail too soon, your warranty costs will skyrocket - both to replace the part, AND labor. And your reputation will be lousy. If people don't buy your car because it's got a bad reputation for needing repairs, not only don't you sell cars, unsold cars don't generate spare parts sales.
Also, the manufacturer isn't the only one selling parts. There are a lot of aftermarket manufacturers out there. If parts start failing often, then that's a bigger draw for these folks. So many of those spare parts sales would go to the aftermarket guys.
So, let's review. Plan in failures to increase revenue. Result - short term increase in revenue, unless you guess wrong on one or two parts and your warranty costs skyrocket. In the long term, you lose car sales because nobody wants to touch your product, and your spare parts sales are canibalized by after-market parts manufacturers.
As an example - Hyundai. I don't believe that Hyundai intentionally built crappy cars when they first hit the US. There was a big initial sales surge because they were cheap. Once the repair rates showed up, sales dropped. A cheap car is no bargain if it's always in the shop and you're paying a fortune to keep it running.
The only thing that's gotten Hyundai back into the market was (1) improving quality, and (2) 10 year/100K warrantee. Are Hyundai's so good that they don't break in 10years/100K? Heck, no. Quality is up, but not that much. Hyundai has had to comit a large sum of money to cover that warrantee, cost, but the decision was that if they didn't inspire consumer confidence (at a considerable cost), they'd be out of the US market.
Built-in failures, or 'planned obsolesence' only worked when everybody in the market did the same. Namely, the '50s' and '60's, when a few US manufacturers owned 90+% of the car market. They could all turn out crap and people bought it. But once the German and Japanese manufacturers got their quality issues worked out, the better quality cars hit US market share very, very hard. US car makers had to improve quality or lose tons of market share.
Plan in failures? A short term approach with a guaranteed bad end.
posted by 192.249....
, Mon, 16 Jun 2003 14:30:56, Tue, 17 Jun 2003 05:30:16 <-- Viewing This Message, Tue, 17 Jun 2003 06:31:50
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