The use of quality metrics in service centres

In industry it is not well realised that a service centre is potentially one of the major contributors to quality improvement. Service is able to collect vital information about the field behaviour of products in interaction with customers. If this information is well analysed and communicated, the recurrence of old problems in new products will drastically be reduced and so will the expenses on recalls, repairs, warranties, and liabilities. In this paper we discuss the kind of information a service centre has to collect and some quality-related metrics that organisations use, like the field call rate, or should use, like the hazard function. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.