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Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA)

Spotting problems before a solution is implemented

When things go badly wrong, it's easy to say with hindsight, "We should have known that would happen". And with a little foresight, perhaps, problems could have been avoided if only someone had asked "What Could Go Wrong?"

By looking at all the things that could possibly go wrong at design stage, you can cheaply solve problems that would otherwise take vast effort and expense to correct, if left until the solution has been deployed in the field. Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) helps you do this.

More than this, FMEA provides a useful approach for reviewing existing processes or systems, so that problems with these can be identified and eliminated.

Understanding FMEA

FMEA grew out of systems engineering, and is a widely-used tool for quality control. It builds on tools like Risk Analysis and Cause and Effect Analysis to try to predict failures before they happen. Originally used in product development, it is also effective in improving the design of business processes and systems.

When using FMEA, you start by looking in detail at the proposed solution (see the tip box below) and then you identify systematically all of the points where it could fail. Once these potential failures have been identified, you rate the potential consequences of each according to:

Severity – how critical is the failure?
Occurrence – how likely is the failure to happen?
Detection – how easy will it be to detect the failure?

Using these rankings, you then identify the most serious threats, and then alter the design to eliminate or minimize the likelihood of the failure you identified.

Once you've redesigned your solution, it's worth repeating the FMEA to ensure that new potential points of failure have not been introduced into the design.

Tip 1:
When using FMEA, it can often be best to draw expert team members from a wide variety of functions, so that you can look at the proposed solution from different angles. The purpose of FMEA is to uncover and assess potential failures, therefore the more thorough the investigation, the more useful the analysis.

Tip 2:
There are a range of tools that you can use to map out the solution you want to examine, and the best tool to use will depend on the type of solution you're looking at. Among the tools you may want to consider using are Flow Charts, Swim Lane Diagrams, Systems Diagrams, or Value Chain Analysis.