Customers are placing increased demands on companies for high quality, reliable products. The increasing capabilities and functionality of many products are making it more difficult for manufacturers to maintain the quality and reliability. Traditionally, reliability has been achieved through extensive testing and use of techniques such as probabilistic reliability modeling. These are techniques done in the late stages of development.
The challenge is to design in quality and reliability early in the development cycle. Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) is methodology for analyzing potential reliability problems early in the development cycle where it is easier to take actions to overcome these issues, thereby enhancing reliability through design. FMEA is used to identify potential failure modes, determine their effect on the operation of the product, and identify actions to mitigate the failures. A crucial step is anticipating what might go wrong with a product. While anticipating every failure mode is not possible, the development team should formulate as extensive a list of potential failure modes as possible. The early and consistent use of FMEA in the design process allows the engineer to design out failures and produce reliable, safe, and customer pleasing products. FMEA also capture historical information for use in future product improvement.
Types of FMEA
There are several types of FMEA; some are used much more often than others are. FMEA should always be done whenever failures would mean potential harm or injury to the user of the end item being designed. The types of FMEA are:
- System - focuses on global system functions
- Design - focuses on components and subsystems
- Process - focuses on manufacturing and assembly processes
- Service - focuses on service functions
- Software - focuses on software functions
