FAILURE MODE AND EFFECT CRITICALITY ANALYSIS

INTRODUCTION

Customers are placing increased demands for high quality and reliable
products. The increasing capabilities and functionality of many products are also
making it more difficult for manufacturers to maintain quality and reliability.
Traditionally, reliability has been achieved through extensive testing and use of
techniques such as probabilistic reliability modeling. These are techniques done in
the late stages of development. The challenge now is to design in quality and
reliability early in the development cycle.

Murphy’s Law says things will go wrong in any given situation, if you give
them a chance. However this popular adage can be defeated using a concept called
Failure Mode and Effect Criticality Analysis (FMECA) developed and formally
introduced in the late 1940s for military usage by the United States Armed Forces.
Learning from failures can be costly, time consuming and at times fatal in times of
war. The USAF developed this concept as a fault prevention tool to ensure the war
fighting machines functions effectively as designed for their purposes to win wars.
The early and consistent use of FMECAs in the design process allows the engineer
to design out failures and produce reliable, safe, and customer pleasing products.
FMECAs also capture historical information for use in future product improvement.

WHAT IS FMECA?

Failure Modes and Effects Criticality Analysis (FMECA) is methodology for

analyzing potential reliability problems early in the development cycle where it is
easier to take actions to overcome these issues, thereby enhancing reliability
through design. Ideally, FMECA begins during the earliest conceptual stages of
design and continues throughout the life of the product or service. FMECA focuses
on preventive rather corrective measures. Preventive simply means that problems
are anticipated and prevented from occurring. Corrective measures are actions
taken to correct or put things in order after a mistake or defect has taken place. The
methodologies of FMECA can be viewed from the following :

 Failure Modes – What Can Go Wrong? It is a risk assessment tool to

identify the potential failures and associated relative risks designed into a
product or service. Risk assessment involves in reducing if not eliminating
these failures to a level that is considered acceptable.

 Failure Causes – Why Would The Failure Happen? It is an assessment

to determine the variation factors inherent in inputs, methodology and the
output specifications. Variations are situations that are not normal as
predicted and they are always found in any process right from inputs,
methods and outputs. This assessment helps to focus on where
improvements can be made to avoid failures.

 Failure Effects - Consequences of Each Failure? It is an assessment to

determine the impact of failures. In most formal systems, the
consequences are then evaluated by three criteria and associated risk
indices: Severity (S), Likelihood of Occurrence (O), and Inability of
Controls to Detect It (D). They could be viewed from the following 3
perspectives :
 Safety. To ensure that users of products and services are
protected from physical harm. It also considers safety to the
surroundings not to cause collateral damage.

 Regulatory. To ensure that products and services conform to

regulations stipulated by governing authorities. Failures could
result in damage to business plans.
  Customer Expectations. To ensure customers’ satisfaction in
terms fitness for use is satisfied at all times. Failures could
create loss in customer confidence in the product or services.

USES OF FMECA

There are many uses and benefits in using FMECA in our pursuit towards
excellence in this competitive global village now. They could be categorized as :

 Minimise Failures. Development of system requirements that minimize

the likelihood of failures. An in-depth understanding of systems could
mean better integration and enhance functionality.

 Eliminate Failures. Development of methods to design and test systems

to ensure that the failures have been eliminated. It may be used to
evaluate risk management priorities for mitigating known threat and
vulnerabilities.

 Identify Customer Expectations. Evaluation of the requirements of the

customer to ensure that those do not give rise to potential failures. This
requires a study of customer needs and expectation as well as their
reaction to failures. It reduces the potential for warranty concerns.

 Identify Design Flaws. Identification of certain design characteristics that

contribute to failures, and minimize or eliminate those effects. This
requires a study of past performances and characteristic of new inputs.

 Effective Control Measure. Tracking and managing potential risks in the

design helps avoid the same failures in future projects. This requires
proper documentation and communication.
  Avoid Fatalities. Ensuring that any failure that could occur will not injure
the customer or seriously impact a system. This ensures safety of
personnel and avoids collateral damage to associated things.

 Pursuit Towards Excellence. This method helps to produce world class

quality products by eliminating product defect, increasing customer
confidence and ensuring better returns to stakeholders. It also facilitates
as a catalyst for teamwork and idea exchange between functions.

LIMITATIONS

FMECA has its fair share of limitation when put to use in the practical sense.
Some of the major limitations are as follows :

 Team Experience. Since FMECA is effectively dependent on the

members of the committee which examines product failures, it is limited by
their experience of previous failures. If a failure mode cannot be identified,
then external help is needed from consultants who are aware of the many
different types of product failure.

 Problem Solving Approach. If used as a top-down tool, FMECA may

only identify major failure modes in a system. Fault tree analysis (FTA) is
better suited for "top-down" analysis. When used as a "bottom-up" tool
FMECA can augment or complement FTA and identify many more causes
and failure modes resulting in top-level symptoms. It is not able to
discover complex failure modes involving multiple failures within a
subsystem, or to report expected failure intervals of particular failure
modes up to the upper level subsystem or system.

 Fault Ranking. The multiplication of the severity, occurrence and

detection rankings may result in rank reversals, where a less serious
 failure mode receives a higher attention than a more serious failure mode.
The reason for this is that the rankings are ordinal scale numbers, and
multiplication is not a valid operation on them. The ordinal rankings only
say that one ranking is better or worse than another, but not by how much.
For instance, a ranking of "2" may not be twice as bad as a ranking of "1,"
or an "8" may not be twice as bad as a "4," but multiplication treats them
as though they are.

CONCLUSION

FMECA is used widely as an effective fault finding tool by technical personnel

and decision making tool at management levels. Since its introduction it has
undergone many researches to perfect this concept and it is now widely used in
many industries as a tool to prevent problems from occurring in any given situation.
Every product or process is subject to different types or modes of failure and the
potential failures all have consequences or effects that can be detrimental to the
success of organizations. Therefore, organizations intending to produce world class
products and services have to embark on this concept extensively in pursuit towards
excellence.

RECOMMENDATION

It is strongly recommended that FMECA to be introduced as quality

assurance tool for personnel pursuing quality management studies and personnel
involved in design and production functions. It is also a tool that has to be used by
top management as a management decision making tool to proper an organisation
to world class standards.