Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA)
is a methodology designed to:
- Identify potential failure modes for
a product or process.
- Assess the risk associated with
those failure modes and prioritize issues for corrective action.
- Identify and carry out corrective
actions to address the most serious concerns.
Benefits of FMEA
Some benefits of performing FMEA/FMECA analysis include:
- Contributes to improved designs for products and processes.
- Higher reliability.
- Better quality.
- Increased safety.
- Enhanced customer satisfaction.
- Contributes to cost savings.
- Decreases development time and re-design costs.
- Decreases warranty costs.
- Decreases waste, non-value added operations.
- Contributes to the development of control plans, testing
requirements, optimum maintenance plans, reliability growth analysis
and related activities.
Cost benefits associated with FMEA are usually expected to come from
the ability to identify failure modes earlier in the process, when they
are less expensive to address. Financial benefits are also derived from
the design improvements that FMEA is expected to facilitate, including
reduced warranty costs, increased sales through enhanced customer
satisfaction, etc.
FMEA
Applications
Some applications for FMEA/FMECA analysis include:
- Used to evaluate the design of
products and processes (manufacturing line, service procedures, etc.)
to anticipate and address potential failure modes early in the process
when they are less expensive to correct.
- Contributes to the development of
effective maintenance procedures. For example, Reliability Centered
Maintenance (RCM) analysis and MSG-3 analysis for the aircraft
industry.
- Integrates with Reliability Growth (RG)
management policies (identify failure modes discovered during testing,
update probabilities of occurrence based on RG testing data).
- Integrates with Control Planning,
DVP&R and related APQP processes.
- Used to evaluate plans to
modify an existing process.
- Used to investigate the reliability of existing systems/processes.
- Provides a central location for reliability-related information for
the system/process.
- Provides a knowledge base for future troubleshooting efforts.
- Provides a learning tool for new engineers.
- Provides input to other system analyses, such as Reliability Block
Diagram (RBD), Markov, Fault Tree, etc.
- Contributes to the identification of requirements for built-in
test equipment (BITE).
- Included among Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) techniques
(nuclear power and other industries).
- Performed to meet a customer requirement and/or to comply with
Safety and Quality requirements, such as:
- ISO 9001, QS 9000
- ISO/TS 16949
- Six Sigma
- FDA Good Manufacturing Practices (GMPs)
- Process Safety Management Act (PSM)
- Etc…
Benefits of Automated FMEA Software (Xfmea)
Some of the benefits of using a software application, such as
ReliaSoft's Xfmea, to automate
FMEA/FMECA analysis, data management and reporting include:
- Helps to establish consistency throughout the organization.
- Provides a structure to allow multiple users to cooperate on the
analysis.
- Easy to generate charts and other reports (such as Actions by Due
Date, Failure Modes by RPN, etc.) in addition to the basic tabular
worksheet.
- Facilitates data management, including the ability to easily
re-use information from existing analyses.
- Provides integration with related analyses, such as process flow
diagrams, Weibull++ analyses, BlockSim projects, etc.
- And more…
For more information on Xfmea's
features, please review our detailed features
summary or request a demonstration copy
of the software. |
|
Xfmea Standard
