Fix Complex Problems with FMEA

What Failures Can Destroy your Product or Service

You could use your gut, previous experience or your natural genius foresight to c determine what failures can cause you serious headaches. Or you can use failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) that will include all the previous aspects mentioned in a structured way to determine and address the possible problems. You will be able to identify failures and their effects on your system, function or process and create solutions to prevent them or mitigates the effects.


FMEA is very effective when developing a new product/service, developing service/ maintenance procedures, or resolving an existing complex system problem.
 
 
When creating your product/service there are functions that must work at some level of performance under various conditions. Safety compliance issues must be met to sell your product/service so you must determine the failures that would create unsafe effects. Some performance failures will generate foreseeable undesirable effects and others maybe discovered during testing. FMEA will give your team a road map to identify critical functions and trouble spots.
 
If your product or service has a maintenance component FMEA is also a great roadmap to generating efficient processes to find the root problem and fix it.
It may seem obvious, but the right people need to be in the room even if its virtual when brainstorming effects that signal performance failures. Those who are writing the requirements, those designing, those testing equipment and those performing the process. Your team will get a much better sense of failure severity, risk and interactions which helps in prioritizing and determining critical paths.

Environmental conditions in which your product will be operating, stored, and transported must be considered i.e., hot, cold, wet, dry, dusty, corrosive, windy, noise, EME/EMI, concentrations of elements in air surrounding it, radiation, altitude etc. (I’m sure there are more, I just listed the ones I had to deal with resolving).

Processes for a service function has some major components like workers education/training, the tools / equipment being used and the people personality performing the “job”.  Creating a robust system that yields consistent results within limits despite variations in multiple factors is the goal.  Just like designing hardware components developing processes is similar as you can make a process multifunctional.

Mapping out what is causing the most impactful effects for your product or process is priceless in determining fixes in a timely and effective manner. Some will go old-school drawing Ishikawa diagrams aka fishbone diagrams, Excel or more complex data driven programs to do FMEA. What ever you use remember garbage in equal garbage out so focus on the quality input.
 
 
Resources:
       Books   , ASQ , EXCELL , Reliasoft

What stories do you have about using FMEA?


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