Key Points

• Conducting an FMEA is a relatively simple process.
• The key to conducting a solid FMEA is to pay attention to the details.
• Document everything you do while conducting an FMEA.

What’s the best process for conducting an FMEA? If you want to start implementing lasting changes into your production line, FMEA is one of the top ways to get things rolling. However, there is a certain procedure you’ll want to follow to make the most of your efforts. If you’re new to the concept, that’s quite alright, as there is quite a bit of detail to keep in mind.

Rather than bog you down with the nitty gritty, let’s develop an easy-to-follow game plan so you can implement FMEA at your leisure. Conducting an FMEA isn’t a difficult process, but it rewards users who pay attention to detail and consider every possibility when mapping out potential pain spots in their project design.

What Is FMEA?

FMEA is short for Failure Modes and Effects Analysis, and it is a comprehensive and systematic approach to getting your processes and projects performing to the best of their ability. As you’re looking deep into the internal workings of your processes, this gives plenty of opportunity to root out potential failure modes. Once these failure modes are identified, you can start implementing lasting solutions that will benefit your production.

FMEA works by devising a game plan, providing a hierarchal ranking of your data points, and then picking the most severe of those to work on first. It can be a rather time-consuming affair, but it certainly saves time and resources when compared to countless man-hours of rework to get something back up to spec.

Since it takes a data-driven approach to problem-solving, you’re giving yourself the means to document lasting changes after implementation. Countless organizations are conducting an FMEA at various stages of project design to get things running spic and span, and your organization can only benefit from leveraging this powerful approach.

Where It Excels

Now that we’ve defined FMEA a little more in-depth, it helps to understand where it can be used. You could think of this as an approach meant to refine processes, but you can certainly use it in other capacities as well. Some organizations lean on using FMEA during the design process of their products, hammering out potential failure modes before they even hit the assembly line.

Further, you can see its flexibility, when refining and optimizing processes that are already in place. It can serve as an alternative to the likes of DMAIC, but it works quite well as a complementary element to several of the tools provided by Lean Six Sigma.

Industry-wise, it excels in just about anything. You’ll see it in the likes of software development, manufacturing, managed services, and far more. At the end of the day, it’s about providing the best possible quality to your customers, and FMEA delivers this in spades, provided you do the leg work necessary to get it running.

Conducting an FMEA: Step-by-Step

Conducting an FMEA is a relatively easy process, provided you know what you’re doing. Thankfully, these steps aren’t extremely difficult to implement. As to which variant of FMEA you’ll want to use, that is entirely down to where you think you’ll see the greatest overall benefit. Utilizing it early in the design process can certainly be helpful, but if you’re looking to simply do some process improvement, it works equally well in that capacity.

If you’re flying without an established procedure, then this is the right time to devise the framework as you go along. This will help you with future projects and also allow the means to provide a solid foundation for other departments looking to leverage this tool for their uses.

There is a rigidity to using FMEA, which works to your benefit. Adhering to the game plan you develop is only going to enable future success. However, as you’ll see throughout each step, you’ll have to pay close attention to what you’re doing to make the most of the results.

Map Out Your Process

Regardless of the variant chosen, you’ll need to map out the process you’re working on. This is in part because you need to identify all the components or dependencies of a given process. Mapping out the process can be done with the usual suspects, like a process flowchart. You’ll want to take the time to brainstorm with your team every single element of a process.

From there, you’ll have to determine the most important components to focus on. You can get as granular as you want with the mapping process, but you might have to conduct separate FMEA cycles to remediate issues later on down the line.

Balance is the key to mapping out the components of your process. You want enough detail to understand the start-to-finish flow of your process as it sits. However, too little detail is prone to missing what could be a crucial failure mode in dire need of addressing.

Figure Out Failure Points

Plenty can go wrong in any process, so this is a crucial step in conducting an FMEA. You and your team should take the time to pore over the process flowchart you’ve created to determine which of the components is prone to failure. Think about it for a moment, if you’re in the automotive industry, you likely know the most likely areas of failure for a given production run of a car.

From there, you can start determining the less likely culprits that cause issues within the process as well. These can be critical to the operation of the process, so take the time to point out each potential failure point.

The rest of your FMEA game plan is going to rely on the successful identification of potential failure points. As such, take your time when working through this portion of the FMEA process. Be diligent, and look at historical data and customer complaints if necessary. That’ll help to determine where to start focusing efforts as you move to the next step.

Determine the Effects of Failure Points

For every cause, there’s an effect, or so the old axiom goes. Each of your potential failure points is going to have a clear and assignable effect. Take a moment to determine each of these failure points. Here’s where the data starts coming into play. While you’re documenting the effects to match the effects, you’ll want to assign numeric rankings.

You’ll need to determine the severity, the rate of occurrence, and the likelihood of detection. This comes into play for the next, but it also gives a bird’s eye view of the potential problems and how they’ll directly impact your processes. You’ll want to determine a ranking scale, at least in the context of your organization for these criteria.

Catastrophic failure points that grind the assembly line to a halt are one consideration to keep in mind, but there are plenty of other ways these effects will hinder your end product. This might take another dive into historical data to determine the severity of potential failure modes, but you’ll need that for the next step.

Calculate Your Rankings

One of the lynchpins of FMEA is your RPN or Risk Priority Number. Recall that I mentioned that FMEA is a hierarchal means of addressing potential fail states with your processes. The RPN is the determining factor as to where you should be focusing your overall efforts. Calculating the failure mode’s RPN is relatively simple, the equation you’ll be using is this:

RPN = Severity * Occurrence * Detection

Each failure mode should have an RPN, which allows you to start working toward the next steps in your FMEA game plan. The RPN in this case are the crucial data points that allow you and your team alike to hone in on which problems need immediate addressing.

Work Out and Implement Solutions

Taking the RPN for each item into consideration, this is where you’ll start developing solutions. Items with a higher RPN ranking need immediate remediation, and you can work your way down from there. Depending on time and budget, it’ll be down to how much breathing room you have for implementing lasting solutions for each failure mode.

If you’re utilizing FMEA during the design phase of your product, then this is where you put solutions into place before things even reach production. However, if the design phase is already completed, then you’re looking at improving the processes in your organization.

Run the Numbers

With any luck, you’ve got solid and proven solutions for the failure states in your process. At this point, you’ll want to go back through and calculate your RPN for each of the failure modes addressed. This can be time-consuming, but you want to make sure that you’ve made lasting changes.

If the RPN of a given failure point hasn’t decreased in any substantial way, then it’s back to the drawing board to implement a better solution. Don’t worry, this is completely normal when conducting an FMEA. Despite its rigidity, it is also a means of promoting creative thinking when addressing potential problems in a process.

Documentation and Consolidation

At this point in the FMEA process, you’re effectively done with the legwork itself. If you haven’t, you should take the time to document any changes, work done, and so forth. This provides a record of what was performed while conducting an FMEA and also provides a framework for future work using the same methodology.

In the event that something does go wrong, you also have the means of looking up exactly what was done to facilitate this. Documentation is key and should be an integral part of any FMEA conducted by your organization.

Other Useful Tools and Concepts

Looking for some other tools of the trade to help your business along? You might do well to learn how to best prepare your organization for the adoption of artificial intelligence. AI is here to say, and learning how to integrate this cutting-edge technology can give you a leg up against your competitors.

Additionally, you might want to take a closer look at how to create an Ishikawa diagram. The humble Fishbone diagram is one of our most useful tools when it comes to conducting root-cause analysis. Learn what tools you can use to make the most of this visual diagram in an effective manner.

Conclusion

Conducting an FMEA isn’t a difficult process necessarily, but it takes an investment of time and the drive to succeed to make a difference. As such, following the steps outlined today when going about conducting yours is going to make a massive difference in the results you’ll see.