Any weaknesses in the design of a new product can lead to field failures after product launch. Correcting these is very costly in time and materials as replacements or repair as well as giving a poor image to customers.

Ricoh estimates that the cost of fixing a single defect rises dramatically the further down the product life cycle it occurs:

However prevention is better (and cheaper) than cure and ERA is also asked to review the design of equipment and quality of construction of components and printed circuit boards in order to avoid future problems.

Recently the RFA group was asked to assess the design procedures used by a large electrical equipment manufacturer that was experiencing an unusually large number of field failures with a new product. All stages from the original market analysis to the use phase were examined including:

	understanding the market requirement. Can the equipment withstand the environmental conditions?
	design. This should consider not just the individual components but the system as the whole and refer back to the original requirement
	testing which is relevant to the these conditions (some companies now use HALT * and HASS **as part of their procedures)
	integration of all of these elements in to the company's quality systems
* highly accelerated life testing
** highly accelerated stress screening

to the assessment of field returns after product launch were examined in detail. Although this product was well designed with many innovative features, failures were occurring for a wide variety of causes.

By examining how the product was developed, the product's design history and matching this to the known failure mechanisms, ERA was able to recommend changes to the design and testing procedures that should avoid significant field failures in the future.