Accendo Reliability

Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site

  • Home
  • About
    • Contributors
  • Reliability.fm
    • Speaking Of Reliability
    • Rooted in Reliability: The Plant Performance Podcast
    • Quality during Design
    • Way of the Quality Warrior
    • Critical Talks
    • Dare to Know
    • Maintenance Disrupted
    • Metal Conversations
    • The Leadership Connection
    • Practical Reliability Podcast
    • Reliability Matters
    • Reliability it Matters
    • Maintenance Mavericks Podcast
    • Women in Maintenance
    • Accendo Reliability Webinar Series
  • Articles
    • CRE Preparation Notes
    • on Leadership & Career
      • Advanced Engineering Culture
      • Engineering Leadership
      • Managing in the 2000s
      • Product Development and Process Improvement
    • on Maintenance Reliability
      • Aasan Asset Management
      • AI & Predictive Maintenance
      • Asset Management in the Mining Industry
      • CMMS and Reliability
      • Conscious Asset
      • EAM & CMMS
      • Everyday RCM
      • History of Maintenance Management
      • Life Cycle Asset Management
      • Maintenance and Reliability
      • Maintenance Management
      • Plant Maintenance
      • Process Plant Reliability Engineering
      • ReliabilityXperience
      • RCM Blitz®
      • Rob’s Reliability Project
      • The Intelligent Transformer Blog
      • The People Side of Maintenance
      • The Reliability Mindset
    • on Product Reliability
      • Accelerated Reliability
      • Achieving the Benefits of Reliability
      • Apex Ridge
      • Metals Engineering and Product Reliability
      • Musings on Reliability and Maintenance Topics
      • Product Validation
      • Reliability Engineering Insights
      • Reliability in Emerging Technology
    • on Risk & Safety
      • CERM® Risk Insights
      • Equipment Risk and Reliability in Downhole Applications
      • Operational Risk Process Safety
    • on Systems Thinking
      • Communicating with FINESSE
      • The RCA
    • on Tools & Techniques
      • Big Data & Analytics
      • Experimental Design for NPD
      • Innovative Thinking in Reliability and Durability
      • Inside and Beyond HALT
      • Inside FMEA
      • Integral Concepts
      • Learning from Failures
      • Progress in Field Reliability?
      • R for Engineering
      • Reliability Engineering Using Python
      • Reliability Reflections
      • Testing 1 2 3
      • The Manufacturing Academy
  • eBooks
  • Resources
    • Accendo Authors
    • FMEA Resources
    • Feed Forward Publications
    • Openings
    • Books
    • Webinars
    • Journals
    • Higher Education
    • Podcasts
  • Courses
    • 14 Ways to Acquire Reliability Engineering Knowledge
    • Reliability Analysis Methods online course
    • Measurement System Assessment
    • SPC-Process Capability Course
    • Design of Experiments
    • Foundations of RCM online course
    • Quality during Design Journey
    • Reliability Engineering Statistics
    • Quality Engineering Statistics
    • An Introduction to Reliability Engineering
    • Reliability Engineering for Heavy Industry
    • An Introduction to Quality Engineering
    • Process Capability Analysis course
    • Root Cause Analysis and the 8D Corrective Action Process course
    • Return on Investment online course
    • CRE Preparation Online Course
    • Quondam Courses
  • Webinars
    • Upcoming Live Events
  • Calendar
    • Call for Papers Listing
    • Upcoming Webinars
    • Webinar Calendar
  • Login
    • Member Home

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

Is this FMEA good?

Is this FMEA good?

It is rare that a third party generated FMEA/FMECA has any value. The development or manufacturing teams and supporting staff should comprise the bulk of the study’s team. Team size for a specific study would include 4 to 10 individuals.

The FMEA/FMECA should provide clear action items that may include:

Conduct research or experiments to understand and quantify uncertainty. This may include exploring how an item responds to specific stress, errors or inputs. Or include experiments to estimate the occurrence rating for a specific potential cause of a failure mode.

Explore alternative solutions that would thwart potential failure causes, mitigate or avoid consequences of a failure, or improve the ability to detect and avert potential failures.

The FMEA/FMECA study should include clear boundaries, focus on preventing initiating cause or avoiding resulting consequences. Inspections, testing, and other detection techniques should be a last resort option.

Studies that start with an item’s bill of materials with the exhaustive study of each item’s potential impact on system performance should be avoided. These studies are tedious and rarely provide any meaningful insights for the development team. Instead, conduct multiple studies with appropriate team members for specific scopes and aims.

For example, as functional requirements become available, study the impact of potential failure modes at the functional level using the plan of record technology. As detailed designs become available, conduct focused studies on subsystems or major components, especially those related to previously identify high-risk areas.

Each team may adjust their scoring to meet the needs of the specific study. Keeping notes on scoring scales permits other teams to later modify the study using a similar scoring system.

The intent is to prioritize actions not to adhere to a fixed scoring approach. An FMEA/FMECA with little no separation of RPNs does not provide guidance for improvements.

Summary

While not an exhaustive set of performance criteria – hopefully, you can use the ideas here to plan and conduct valuable studies.

Filed Under: Articles, Musings on Reliability and Maintenance Topics, on Product Reliability Tagged With: FMEA

About Fred Schenkelberg

I am the reliability expert at FMS Reliability, a reliability engineering and management consulting firm I founded in 2004. I left Hewlett Packard (HP)’s Reliability Team, where I helped create a culture of reliability across the corporation, to assist other organizations.

« Using The Exponential Distribution Reliability Function
Adjusting Parameters to Achieve MTBF Requirement »

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Article by Fred Schenkelberg
in the Musings series

Join Accendo

Receive information and updates about articles and many other resources offered by Accendo Reliability by becoming a member.

It’s free and only takes a minute.

Join Today

Recent Articles

  • test
  • test
  • test
  • Your Most Important Business Equation
  • Your Suppliers Can Be a Risk to Your Project

© 2025 FMS Reliability · Privacy Policy · Terms of Service · Cookies Policy