Applications and Benefits of FMEA and Xfmea
Benefits of Using Xfmea
- Keyword searchable "knowledge base" of your FMEAs
- Easy to reuse information from existing FMEAs or predefined phrase libraries
- Establish consistency throughout the organization and allow multiple users to cooperate on FMEAs
- Feedback loop for the corrective actions required to implement your FMEA
- Reports, queries and charts for your FMEA data, such as Top 10 Failure Modes by RPN, Actions by Due Date, etc.
Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) is a methodology designed to:
- Identify potential failure modes for a product or process.
- Assess the risk associated with those failure modes and prioritize issues for corrective action.
- Identify and carry out corrective actions to address the most serious concerns.
Benefits of FMEA or FMECA
Some benefits of performing FMEA/FMECA analysis include:
- Contributes to improved designs for products and processes.
- Higher reliability.
- Better quality.
- Increased safety.
- Enhanced customer satisfaction.
- Contributes to cost savings.
- Decreases development time and re-design costs.
- Decreases warranty costs.
- Decreases waste, non-value added operations.
- Contributes to the development of control plans, testing requirements, optimum maintenance plans, reliability growth analysis and related activities.
Cost benefits associated with FMEA are usually expected to come from the ability to identify failure modes earlier in the process, when they are less expensive to address. Financial benefits are also derived from the design improvements that FMEA is expected to facilitate, including reduced warranty costs, increased sales through enhanced customer satisfaction, etc.
FMEA / FMECA Applications
Some applications for FMEA/FMECA analysis include:
- Used to evaluate the design of products and processes (manufacturing line, service procedures, etc.) to anticipate and address potential failure modes early in the process when they are less expensive to correct.
- Contributes to the development of effective maintenance procedures. For example, Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) analysis and MSG-3 analysis for the aircraft industry.
- Integrates with Reliability Growth (RG) management policies (identify failure modes discovered during testing, update probabilities of occurrence based on RG testing data).
- Integrates with Control Planning, DVP&R and related APQP processes. Used to evaluate plans to modify an existing process.
- Used to investigate the reliability of existing systems/processes.
- Provides a central location for reliability-related information for the system/process.
- Provides a knowledge base for future troubleshooting efforts.
- Provides a learning tool for new engineers.
- Provides input to other system analyses, such as Reliability Block Diagram (RBD), Markov, Fault Tree, etc.
- Contributes to the identification of requirements for built-in test equipment (BITE).
- Included among Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) techniques (nuclear power and other industries).
- Performed to meet a customer
requirement and/or to comply with Safety and Quality requirements,
such as:
- ISO 9001, QS 9000
- ISO/TS 16949
- Six Sigma
- FDA Good Manufacturing Practices (GMPs)
- Process Safety Management Act (PSM)
