While the cost of many electronic components may be small, the cost of failure can be financially ruinous. Equally a small failure can result in huge damage to capital equipment. Halts in production, infrastructure failure, product recalls, insurance claims, or loss of business due to lost reputation can incur high costs. Has a product been misused, can it be repaired, who is responsible? ERA provides technical assistance to solicitors, insurers, accountants, loss adjustors, and accident investigators in all such cases.

How ERA can help you ERA provides soundly based objective technical evidence that clarifies many contentious situations, for example:
	In production: identifying cause of fault when production has been stopped, investigating process quality and changes.
	Field returns: identifying whether faults are due to design, assembly or use.
	Insurance claims and disputes between parties: providing technical information to determine cause and responsibility for a loss, identifying causes of fires in electronic systems.
	Supply chain: providing technical information to determine where responsibility lies in the chain, checking whether components are counterfeit or below acceptable quality.
	Accidents: investigating the cause of failure and identifying the root cause.
ERA analyses the fault, determines the root cause and recommends corrective actions. The information gained is often crucial to:
	Loss quantification: Investigations can provide technical information to back up insurance claims, to refute an insurance assessor's suggested solution, to establish responsibility and to identify the extent of damage requiring repair or replacement. A series of failures spread out in time may or may not be due to the same cause. Our investigation can clarify this. Statistical analysis can show the likelihood of further failures.
	Disputes and litigation: Technical evidence often clarifies who is at fault and how. ERA works for solicitors, companies and courts providing expert witness statements to support claims.

Case studies
Here are just a few examples of cases we have investigated to demonstrate the breadth of our capability.

£25M bottling plant burnt down soon after opening: ERA investigation showed that plant had to be replaced rather than just cleaned.
Television fire: ERA investigation showed that the mains switch was inadequate. A product recall resulted.
£5M motor drive unit to pump gas through pipeline: ERA investigation showed that damage was mostly superficial and could be repaired. Drive units for oil drilling rig off Africa: ERA investigation identified cause as initial fault in water cooling system rather than systematic fault, so they could be repaired.
Li-ion battery fire in type of mobile phone (similar to recent problems with batteries in laptops): ERA investigation showed that there was no localised defect but a broad degradation. This model was recalled by the network operator.