Of all the performance measurements available to managers, one of the most effective is to measure failure. For engineers and statisticians this is familiar territory, but for most others the very concepts are foreign and often avoided. 

TekTrakker measures hardware quality and design in a way that is intuitive and easily applied to a wide variety of management tasks.  Everyone understands that having products that rarely break are preferable to those that break down frequently.  Sturdy and stable products are always more desirable. The core mission of TekTrakker is to create the background data to allow managers to identify the best performing products for their particular projects.  

Failure rate, as defined by TekTrakker, is intended to measure failures caused by manufacturer design or production. Regardless of the additional complications posed by environment, software, or additional product interactions, TekTrakker measurement is intended to help managers identify  failure at the core level. 

In order to measure device failure at this level, TekTrakker works from raw data provided by service databases to remove problems caused by outside events, such as vandalism or accidental damage, as well as those events resolved remotely with a software patch or a power cycle. It is not essential to have a root cause or specifics regarding parts in order to calculate MTBF. The details are useful and presented where available. The only criteria is that the problem was a hardware failure resolved by a part or unit replacement.

Limitations of which products can be managed by TekTrakker are only those of locating data sources. If a product has a known quantity of deployed assets in a given month, and a consistent source of repairs or replacements made against those assets, MTBF can be calculated within TekTrakker.