ABSTRACT
The industrialisation of Europe and Asia leads to the development of innovative and reliable technical complex products. Industrial nations like Germany and Japan took separate ways to highly developed industrial nations. This leads to different goals and philosophies in terms of reliability and safety design regarding product and manufacturing process development. This paper shows essential aspects of the differences in German and Japanese reliability and safety engineering. Base of operations is the fundamental difference of the realisation of the principles “innovation” versus “optimisation”: German product functionality contains often innovative solutions; Japanese product functionality shows often optimised solutions. These different designs are caused by different engineering philosophies and factors: The paper discusses the historical factors, cultural factors and geographical conditions, which lead to the different technical reliability and safety engineering solutions in Germany and Japan. Finally, the paper shows two examples of German and Japanese technical products and engineering solutions to illustrate the different strategies in German and Japanese product design.
