1. A systematic study of failures will help in identifying areas that may cause :

i.  Loss of adjacent parts/ equipment/ whole equipment.

ii.  Loss of production and revenue.

iii.   Loss of human life. Evaluate the safety index of a product or system.

iv.   Loss of resources, damage to the environment.

v.   Loss  of  goodwill  and  damage  to  the  competitive  position  of  the company

2.  Determine    the   failure   distribution   of   products,    their   sub-systems    and components; identifying the underlying causes.

3.  Establish a correlation of failure occurrence with life of equipment.

4.  Study the types of failures experienced by parts, components, products and systems; the effects of age, mission duration, application  and operation stress level on overall system reliability. This will lead to recommendations on strengthening design and R & D effort to minimize these.

5.  Provide methods of updating reliability predictions as more data and test results become available.