FMEA in Practice: From Plan to Risk-Based Decision Making

Use FMEA to identify, analyze, and evaluate risk and define actionable controls that meet project objectives. Plan with end in mind by defining scope and communicating risk needs across teams.

FMEA informs development by shaping goals and requirements, revealing hidden reliability needs, and identifying critical parts and supplier relationships. It guides test plans, quality control, and project risk management.

Strategically scope FMEAs to balance uncovering critical failures with avoiding unnecessary work, treating them as living documents updated with new knowledge, guided by function-level scope.

Place your fmeas in context by examining internal and external relationships, existing criteria, and alignment with other fmeas to determine scope and risk-based decisions.

Apply problem solving techniques to fmea by distinguishing symptoms, problems, and causes to identify root causes. Use potential failure modes, effects, and causes with pareto-focused risk assessments and tree diagrams.

Break customer complaints into outcomes and impacts to estimate probabilities and expected loss. Use a preliminary risk assessment to prioritize fmea activities and identify prevention opportunities.

Scope FMEA by tracing drivers to outcomes and impacts in a bike stand scenario, selecting system, use, design, process, or service FMEAs to manage risk and guide improvements.

Predefine risk rating criteria before analysis to enable honest FMEA assessments. Evaluate severity, occurrence, and detection as a composite risk to prioritize actions and support iterative improvements.

Examine criticisms of traditional fmea methods, including ordinal rating scales and risk matrices, and learn to reframe risk from point estimates to probabilities for robust decision making.

Quantify and communicate risk uncertainty in fmea using probability mass functions for ordinal data and probability density functions for continuous data, including triangular, beta, pert, and uniform distributions.

Explore alternative prioritization methods for FMEA beyond traditional RPM, including risk sensitive RPN, weighted scales, and criticality analysis to better handle uncertainty and risk.

Apply the adept framework to Fmea, aligning the team and setting a clear goal. Use discovery, affinity diagrams, and brainwriting to identify, examine, and prioritize failure modes with action items.

Apply severity, occurrence, and detection ratings in fmea to initiate risk ranking, using probability distributions to communicate uncertainty and enable team consensus.

Study the completed fmea results to identify risk remediation and prioritize by severity, occurrence, and detection, noting that rpn is not a threshold and trends guide quality and safety decisions.

Document and track recommended actions in the fmea to ensure follow-through, record iterations including no action necessary decisions, and proactively manage due dates.

Evaluate how risk changes after FMEA action items by assessing which measures (severity, occurrence, or detection) were reduced, and justify remaining residual risk.

Explore strategic metrics for fmea that track long-term performance, quantify risks averted per project, and capture qualitative insights from interviews to improve proactive risk management and lessons learned.