chflyer wrote:
But MTBF calculations don’t have the impact built in of wrench-happy mechanics fiddling with the product.
Actually yes. The first time I heard about MTBF was at the university in a class about industrial production facilities. That’s also where MTBF originates. A production facility is normally very complicated. It needs maintenance all the time, and it is changed and renewed all the time. The way MTBF (and MTTR, MTTF etc) is used, is more as a parameter to measure the quality/cost/time of maintenance, in a never ending quest to optimize cost, down time, production throughout the life of the facility. The aim is not to get MTBF as high as possible, but to minimize the associated cost over the life span of the facility.
But MTBF, or probably more often used MTTF, are simple formulas that can be used to get statistics on everything that fails.
