If you develop, manufacture, or distribute a product that has to perform its intended function for at least a certain duration, you probably need to do product reliability testing. Otherwise, you may have no idea how soon the product will fail and how it will fail, and that might cause you serious issues in the marketplace. Our clients often ask us questions on this topic. Read my responses to the most frequently asked questions. … [Read more...]
Reliability Testing Plan For A Home Appliance (an Electronic Hairbrush) in China [Example]
So, you have found the product you wanted to re-sell on Alibaba or Global Sources. You feel the supplier will be fine. You had them audited and they seem reliable. They have the required certifications for selling on your market. Like tens of thousands of other buyers of home appliances are, you will go ahead if you feel there is sufficient market demand for this product. However, there is one important thing you forgot. How do these products behave in their users' hands? Maybe you … [Read more...]
Why Design Defects Are Behind Many Quality/Safety Issues
There is a tendency for inexperienced importers to blame their suppliers for all quality and safety issues that come up. However, in the situation where the buyer works with an OEM or a contract manufacturer, they share some (and usually all) of the responsibility when something goes wrong. It may well be that manufacturing or design defects are the cause. … [Read more...]
How HALT and HASS Can Help your Product Development Efforts
HALT and HASS are accelerated product reliability testing methods focused on finding potential defects in products. These acronyms stand for: HALT – Highly Accelerated Life Test HASS – Highly Accelerated Stress Screen If you are developing a new product ready for manufacturing and you want to know if it will keep working as planned after a few years of use, you can send a few samples to a testing laboratory and ask them to perform HALT and/or HASS. These types of tests are … [Read more...]