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Manufactured goods are put through a quality control process that ensures an acceptable reliability level before being released to the public. However, manufacturing processes can change over time, which may affect the quality of a product. Warranty claims provide an opportunity to obtain feedback on the manufacturing process. In this study, a Weibull failure model is used to simulate the occurrence of warranty claims. The parameters of the Weibull model used to generate the data are estimated from the simulated warranty claims. The length of time required to obtain accurate parameter estimates is examined. This study is based on claims arising from the failure of a single component, but the techniques can also be used for a simple product or a subsystem of a more complex product that can be suitably modelled by a Weibull distribution. Our study shows that at least two years of data are required to obtain acceptable estimates of the Weibull parameters

Accelerated testing is often used to gauge the reliability of a product before it is released to the market. Warranty data provide valuable additional information about the reliability of a product and its constituent components via field data. In this study, warranty data provided by an Australian automobile manufacturer is used. This article considers the need to clean the data before commencing any analysis. It discusses the distribution of warranty claims and the use of warranty data to model the reliability of elemental components of an automobile. Various model options are considered before suitable modelling is adopted. The reality of modelling the reliability of a vehicle containing a large number of components is considered and a suitable method is adopted. Verification of the reliability modelling is made by comparing an estimated warranty cost with the actual cost.