Guide on Failure Modes and Effect Analysis (FMEA)

Failure Modes and Effect Analysis (FMEA) is a procedure in product development and operations management for identifying potential failure modes, determining their effect on the operation of the product, and identifying actions to mitigate the failures.

Importance: FMEA is essential because it systematically reduces potential failure modes in a system. It is a proactive strategy to identify problems before they happen, thus helping with risk mitigation. It assists in optimizing resources by prioritizing the main issues and working on them as per their rank of severity.

What is FMEA: FMEA is a step-by-step approach for identifying all possible ways in a process, product, or service that can fail (failure modes), and evaluating the effect of those failures. The goal of FMEA is to quantify and prioritize failure modes in order to take action to eliminate or reduce the likelihood of potential failures.

How it works: FMEA involves several steps: Identify failure modes, determine the effect of the failures, assign severity, occurrence, and detection ratings and compute the Risk Priority Number (RPN), decide on corrective actions and follow up on their completion.

Exam Tips: Answering Questions on Failure Modes and Effect Analysis: Understand key terms related to FMEA like Risk Priority Number (RPN) and failure modes. When analyzing a failure mode, start by describing what would happen when this failure occurs. Use real-world examples wherever possible to make your answers more coherent. Remember, the main focus of your answer should be on the identification and mitigation of the risk. Always check, if the question is on FMEA, the answer should invariably speak to risk mitigation.