How to Effectively Plan for FMEA Challenges to Improve Quality and Save Costs

A commercial developer of precision special-purpose test equipment asked us for guidance and review of their newly developed Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) program for one of their automated test systems. In this case reliability was important to lessen lost time/revenue impact. If the test equipment failed during the week-long test sequence, the test had to start from the beginning – severely hurting the customer’s production schedule and threatening the reputation of the test equipment manufacturer. The analysis was a unique challenge because the FMEA focused on the software that controlled the test equipment, rather than on the test equipment hardware which was largely commercial off-the-shelf (COTS).

Thanks to the early efforts of the military and aerospace industries to prove the merits of FMEA, this analysis has been shown to be applicable to commercial organizations as a means to identify ways to save money in long term products and projects, as in the above example. FMEA helps to find unacceptable consequences of every kind of component failure, identifies undesirable (but perhaps acceptable if unlikely) consequences of component failures, and improves system reliability by identifying weak links in the reliability chain – finding where the aggregate reliability of the product might be improved by use of alternate components, or by design changes.

An FMEA can be a tedious undertaking, which means without the right expertise it can be error-prone. Fortunately, this can be mitigated by a structured process that guides the effort and assures that the analysts remain on the right track.

We have found that this approach works well for every kind of FMEA and we continually pursue process improvements. We are confident that if you have a product which is in production or has a long lifespan, an FMEA can ultimately save lifecycle cost and increase customer satisfaction through reduction of defects and the delays they cause. Explore HBM Prenscia Engineering Services and Solutions for more information and technical papers on this, and many other related topics.