An Introduction, Basic Steps, and Examples of How FMEA Goes Wrong

Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) starts with brainstorming and ends with prioritized actions. A great tool to get your team thinking about system failures. Let’s explore the fundamental steps and beset practices to get value from your analysis.

You may hear moans and groans when you suggest the team participate in an FMEA. Sometimes, the analysis is tedious, and sometimes, it provides little actionable results.

Your task when facilitating or participating in an FMEA is to help the entire team employ the tool to improve the team’s ability to achieve the customer’s expected reliability performance. You can help make the FMEA process useful for all involved. You need to know the fundamentals of FMEA and a few best practices to succeed.

Let’s review the basic steps for any FMEA, plus how the FMEA process is best set up for success. Plus, let’s expose a few very poor practices that eliminate value from the process.

The discussion will focus on the flexibility of the FMEA process, plus the hints and tips to get past the potential rough spots during the analysis. Bring your experience, best practices, and questions to this discussion about FMEA.

This Accendo Reliability webinar originally broadcast on 11 April 2017.