Failure mode and effects analysis is a solid framework for studying the reliability of system, and understanding its intricacies better. It does require a special approach in order to use it correctly though, and you’ll additionally want to make sure that you’re paying attention to some factors that people commonly get wrong. Avoiding those common mistakes is one of the first steps you’ll want to take when applying FMEA to your operations, and you should take some time to properly study the problems that come up most often.

1. Overcomplicating

In order to run FMEA effectively, you’ll want to make sure that your approach is as simplified and streamlined as possible. Otherwise you’re going to run into severe problems sooner or later, and implementing an FMEA scheme that’s overly complex also defeats the point of running FMEA in the first place. When there are too many potential points of failure, you simply cannot trust the methodology to work correctly, and you’ll want to minimize them and ensure that everything is done as easily as possible.

2. Not taking interfaces into account

You should not only study the behavior of main components; it’s also important to look at how the different interfaces between them are working, as sometimes there will be a lot of potential for failure in those areas. Unfortunately, this is also an area that gets somewhat ignored by companies implementing FMEA in their operations, which can usually lead to significantly incorrect results from the analysis. It’s critical to ensure that every part of the system is taken into consideration and not just the ones that you see first.

3. Running FMEA too late

FMEA has to be applied regularly and in due time in order to ensure that it has an appropriate effect on your operations. If you use it as an emergency post-fix and not as something that was properly planned in advance, you’re setting yourself up for trouble, and you’re probably not going to be very happy with the outcome. The best approach is to set FMEA up in a way that it’s a standard part of your process and something that can be called upon in a standardized way, instead of having to set up each of its iterations separately.

4. Not drawing proper conclusions

The main point of FMEA is to learn something useful from the ordeal it doesn’t make much sense to just run it once and not draw any conclusions from what you see. That’s a huge waste of resources and a good way to set your business on the wrong track as well. It’s important that you pay attention to the way you’re analyzing the results of your FMEA implementation, and prioritize learning from your past mistakes. There will always be a good opportunity to learn something new when using FMEA; the question is if you have the appropriate systems in place to actually draw those conclusions. It can take some time to come up with a well-defined system for that though, so don’t worry if you don’t have it in place right from the start.

5. Relying on inexperienced people

Last but not least, FMEA should be carried out by people who actually know what it’s about, and understand the intricate implications that it has at every step of the way. It’s okay to teach your employees new things and train new people in FMEA, but you should always have someone experienced enough on your team to handle the main parts of the work and to ensure that everyone else is performing their duties correctly. Otherwise, things will devolve into chaos before you even realize it.

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Failure Mode Effects Analysis or FMEA for short can be a very useful technique for determining where your processes are coming short, and figuring out ways to improve the overall productivity of your organization. There are many areas where FMEA can work well, especially if applied with some more sense for the current business. However, knowing where to specifically focus on using FMEA and understanding the implications of the technique properly can have huge positive results on your overall success.

Verifying New Developments

Anytime you have something major coming up in your pipeline, it should be analyzed thoroughly, especially if it’s new hardware or specific functionality of your products. Note that this is valid even if you haven’t observed any faults yet it’s a good idea to do a run of FMEA to ensure that there is nothing inherently wrong with the design of the newly introduced element.

It doesn’t make much sense to do this if you’re not going to record the results of your analysis in a way that allows you to easily compare them though. You will need a properly designed database for your analysis, and you’ll also want to ensure that the data collection practices applied during this analysis are aligned with the information you actually need to collect.

Previously Problematic Components

Sometimes you’ll decide to integrate a new component in your work, and it might be something that’s already been used in the industry elsewhere. In cases where this component has a history of poor performance, it’s important that you pay special attention to verifying that it works properly in your circumstances. Don’t just trust reports from elsewhere in the industry, you should pay attention to your own analysis as well. In fact, you should run your own analysis even if you see reports that seem aligned with the conditions you work under, as you never know what small factors might end up affecting the overall performance of implementing the new element.

Also keep in mind that just because something has a history of causing problems, this doesn’t mean that it should also be expected to fail in your own work. That’s the whole point of running FMEA on new components anyway, to ensure that they are in line with your style of work and that they don’t have any potential for causing problems.

Safety First!

Last but definitely not least, if you have any concerns about the safety of a given component and its use, you should prioritize it in your tests above everything else until you’re sure that it’s safe. This will go a long way in ensuring the overall safety of your operations, and it will be an important part of the work of some specific industries, but everyone should pay attention to it in general.

Try not to change too many parameters at the same time when it comes to analyzing potentially unsafe components too. It’s possible that you might go overboard and change too much, resulting in other problems coming up that were not even there before. This can quickly lead to a messy situation where you’re only working to correct previous issues and never manage to get any real work done to introduce something useful to the project, which can be a dangerous trap that can quickly kill even a more promising project.

Conclusion

FMEA is a great technique that can help you a lot when you want to make sure that you know exactly what causes certain issues in your operation, and how to go about correcting them. It’s important to understand how it should be applied though, and what areas of your operation can benefit most from a proper FMEA implementation, as otherwise you can end up wasting a lot of effort for nothing.

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