FAILURE MODES AND EFFECTS ANALYSIS

What Is It

Failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) is a tool to analyze as much information as possible on a given hardware or system to identify all possible failure modes and assess the consequences or effects of each of these failures. It also addresses the criticality or risk of individual failures. Countermeasures (mitigation steps) can be defined, for each failure mode, and consequent reductions in risk can be evaluated. FMEA is a useful tool for cost and benefit studies to implement effective risk mitigation and countermeasure, and as precursors to a Fault Tree Analysis.

When To Use

Use FMEA

• As a design tool to assess project risks and propose corrective action to mitigate those risks.
• To identify high-risk, single-point failures.

Benefits

This method

• Helps to answer the question what can go wrong?
• Identifies all failure modes (risks) and deficiencies.
• Provides reassurance that the cause, effect, and associated risk of component failures have been appropriately addressed.
• Is applicable within system-subsystem interfaces, and can be applied at the system, subsystem, component, or part levels.
• Breaks down activities into detailed steps for better management.