FMEA is documented on WorkClout
Managers, engineers, and workers perform quality checks to prevent common failure modes
Corrective and preventive action is documented
FMEA is updated as needed
Both a qualitative and systematic tool, FMEA's are created using WorkClouts custom table form fields. An effective FMEA helps you anticipate what could go wrong during production. In addition to helping you identify how product and process could fail, creating an FMEA helps find the cause of the failure and prioritize the likelihood of it happening before it ever happens.
To find all the possible failure modes within a product and process, you need to have the right personnel involved to help provide critical insight into their day-to-day and how it could potentially lead to a failure mode. It would help if you also considered inviting suppliers and even customers to help document alternative viewpoints.
During brainstorming, it's important to remember that "anything that can go wrong, will go wrong" - Murphy's Law. Beyond just identifying areas that can go wrong, make sure to document and describe the possible cause and how it can trickle down into more significant quality issues.
Typically there are three buckets used for FMEA analysis.
1 - the severity of the effect on the customer
2 - the possible frequency of the problem occurring
3 - the ease with which the problem can be detected
Every participant within the brainstorm must agree and rank each failure mode in these three categories using a range of 1-10 (1 = low, 10 = high). FMEA is a qualitative process, but it's vital to helping make key decisions and aligning the departments to a single north star metric.
Once these priorities have been agreed upon, you can now calculate a risk priority number or RPN for each line item.
RPN = severity x occurrence x detection
Once all calculations for the RPN have been complete, you can now adjust the order to prioritize the highest risk priority numbers first. Using a color code can help your team visualize the total number of essential Failure Modes with the most significant impact (red = high RPN, yellow = medium RPN, and green = low RPN). The goal here is to eliminate as many of the high-priority failure modes now so that 80% of issues can be prevented by solving 20% of the top failure mode's identified.
Once completed, it'll be important for everyone to assign an expected completion date to each failure mode. When corrective actions have been identified, your team should correct them and reassess the scores to maintain an updated FMEA.
The FMEA is an immensely valuable tool that, if done right, can give tremendous forward momentum to your process early in the lifecycle, which helps overall team alignment and morale. By aligning all departments to a common goal, every worker can act with intention and collectively improve to help deliver quality products to the customer.
