Quality, Warranty and Preventive Maintenance examines the impact of product quality on warranty and maintenance costs and strategies, from the perspectives of both manufacturers and users. In addition, the theories of warranty and preventive maintenance are introduced and discussed. Common wisdom supports the notion that better product quality means lower warranty costs for the manufacturer, and lower maintenance costs for the users of a manufactured product. This proposition is examined in some detail on the basis of failure time models. The authors investigate what exactly better quality means in warranty and maintenance management, and how it impacts warranty policies and costs for the manufacturer, and replacement and maintenance strategies and costs for the users. In measuring quality improvement, the main concepts and tools used are those of stochastic ordering and mixture models. The theoretical base of the work is a time-varying failure-rectification process. This process includes, as special cases, replacement, minimal repair, and imperfect repair, as alternative rectification modes that may be available to the manufacturer or the user in warranty-servicing or maintaining a product. In addition to serving as a unifying base for the entire monograph, the use of this process enables one to investigate jointly optimal repair-effort/warranty-policy and repair-effort/maintenance-strategy configurations for repairable units. This book should be of interest to researchers in industry and academia, and to quality, warranty and maintenance professionals, specialists, and managers with a technical background. It is suitable as a textbook to support graduate-level seminar courses in OR/MS, IE and business administration curricula.

The author presents a new approach to the study of private pensions in the united States and Canada. Whereas traditional approaches focus on the firm as the key to analyzing pension obligations and the impact of pensions on economic processes, Sahin takes the individual worker as the unit of analysis. The evolution of costs and benefits are then determined over the work life, which may include several jobs and membership in different pension plans. "The Worklife Report"

Sahin presents a new approach to the study of private pensions in the United States and Canada. While traditional approaches focus on the firm as the key to analyzing pension obligations and the impact of pensions on economic processes, Sahin takes the individual worker as the unit of analysis. The evolution of costs and benefits are then determined over the work life, which may include several jobs and membership in different pension plans. Because the conventional approaches generally assume no job mobility and a single employer, Sahin demonstrates, they fail to adequately reflect the actual status of individual pension benefits, the effects of job mobility, and the unequal distribution of pension benefits to individuals with comparable working lives and wage profiles.

To gain a clear view of private pensions and their impact on workers, employers, and public policy, Sahin shows that an analytical model that takes into account the interaction of job mobility, inflation, vesting rules, pension coverage, and portability must be employed. By taking the worker as the unit of analysis and emphasizing the dynamics of pension accumulation, Sahin is able to properly assess pension benefits from the perspective of the individual worker who needs to make rational job decisions, from the point of view of the employer concerned with the efficient and economical use of human resources, and from the public policy standpoint where the issue is the overall effectiveness of the private pension system. A pioneering contribution to the study of pension benefits, this volume will be of significant value to employee benefit specialists, policymakers, actuaries, and financial advisors.

This is a renewal-theoretic analysis of a class of single-item (s, S) inventory systems. Included, in a unified exposition, are both con tinuous and periodic review systems under fairly general random de mand processes. The monograph is complete in the sense that it starts from the derivation of the time dependent and stationary dis tributions of basic stochastic processes related to these systems and concludes with the construction and testing of simple, distribution free approximations for optimal control policies. However, it is rather incomplete as an account of single-item inventory systems in that it narrowly focuses on systems with full backlogging of unfilled demand and constant lead times, through what has come to be known as stationary analysis. The level is intermediate, and the style is informal. Some prior knowledge of probability theory and inventory control is assumed on the part of the reader. Given these, the monograph is self-contained. Extensive use is made ofrenewal-theoretic concepts and results; these are reviewed in Chapter 2.

Quality, Warranty and Preventive Maintenance examines the impact of product quality on warranty and maintenance costs and strategies, from the perspectives of both manufacturers and users. In addition, the theories of warranty and preventive maintenance are introduced and discussed. Common wisdom supports the notion that better product quality means lower warranty costs for the manufacturer, and lower maintenance costs for the users of a manufactured product. This proposition is examined in some detail on the basis of failure time models. The authors investigate what exactly better quality means in warranty and maintenance management, and how it impacts warranty policies and costs for the manufacturer, and replacement and maintenance strategies and costs for the users. In measuring quality improvement, the main concepts and tools used are those of stochastic ordering and mixture models. The theoretical base of the work is a time-varying failure-rectification process. This process includes, as special cases, replacement, minimal repair, and imperfect repair, as alternative rectification modes that may be available to the manufacturer or the user in warranty-servicing or maintaining a product. In addition to serving as a unifying base for the entire monograph, the use of this process enables one to investigate jointly optimal repair-effort/warranty-policy and repair-effort/maintenance-strategy configurations for repairable units. This book should be of interest to researchers in industry and academia, and to quality, warranty and maintenance professionals, specialists, and managers with a technical background. It is suitable as a textbook to support graduate-level seminar courses in OR/MS, IE and business administration curricula.