Reliability and Redundancy in Production Management
Introduction
Product quality determines the success with the product. One of the key drivers of quality is the performance of the product over a period of time. Performance of product is determined by the reliability and redundancy. Reliability increases the efficiency while redundancy increases the current capability and expectations.
Any production organization sets a goal of achieving production efficiency and ability to operate at an optimum level at all the time. Furthermore, the production should be achieved with a least level of wastage.
Production reliability is dependent upon speed, quality and time availability. Equipment failure leads to outage and frequent breakdown, which affect the quality of the products. Frequent machine breakdowns also decrease production speed thus affecting time availability. Theoretically, it is recommended to set employees with a goal of reliability.
Reliability
Important characteristics of reliability are as follows:
Reliability is divided into two main parts, and they are as follows:
It has been observed that reliability increases if regular maintenance is undertaken.
Redundancy
Redundancy is defined as an addition of information, resource and time to the existing product or system than required for its optimum performance. Redundancy is of following types:
From the above it can be concluded that redundancy provides extra reliability to product and systems. It helps prevention of decline in performance without direct manual intervention. The importance of the redundancy increase even more when system or product is performing a critical, sensitive and complicated task.
Redundancy is sometimes accompanied with failure. These failures are function failure and reliability failure. Functional failure is observed from the start of product life, and it is caused by production or raw material defect. Reliability failure is observed after usage over period of time.
Reliability is measured through reliability index and failure rate. Reliability index is defined as the ratio of production losses to the loss per production loss. Failure rate is defined as the number of failure per unit time, which decreases initially with passage of time.
Redundancy and Total Quality Management
Total quality management philosophy talks about producing consistent quality of product over a period of time. Redundancy production increases overall cost of production as the extra effort is put into maintaining targeted quality.
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