Hello. My name is Lee Dawson with Quality-One, and we're here to talk about Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA).
Why do we do an FMEA? An FMEA is performed in order to capture potential technical risks and develop countermeasures to reduce the probability of failure.
In an FMEA, risk is the substitute for failure. As such, we treat it just as if a failure was in our hands. That's to say that if the risk has been determined by a cross-functional team of people, we take an action in order to remove it so that the failure will not occur.
Now, we don't like to suggest that anyone try to do an FMEA without some kind of knowledge or understanding of how the process works, as it can be kind of confusing. (Consider FMEA Training to make sure that you get it right). The board behind me shows a typical FMEA form. As you can see there's a fairly large number of columns. That can be confusing to most people who are just starting out doing FMEA.
The idea behind an FMEA is to break it up into three equal portions.
***FMEA Pre-Work Portion***
The Pre-work portion includes the first four columns of the FMEA. That includes the functions, failure modes, effects and severity rankings for each of the failure modes and their effects.
***Causes, Prevention Methods, and Occurrence***
Sometimes, when people are looking at this appropriately, they use that second portion to determine special characteristics that might be passed forward from a Design FMEA (DFMEA) to a Process FMEA (PFMEA).
***Design Controls or Process Controls***
This column is all about what tests and methods would be available for testing a particular failure mode, or causing a particular failure mode to occur in the test itself by exciting that failure mode and its cause.
In a Process FMEA, the Process Controls column is how I will catch or prevent a defect from being produced or getting out of the shop. This protects a customer in the future. In a Process FMEA, the Process Controls section is related to the Control Plan, which determines how often and with what tools we will check and verify that a particular process is running appropriately.
That gives you a pretty good rough idea of what an FMEA does. Watch other FMEA videos from Quality-One International, or get more information about Failure Mode and Effects Analysis.
