What Is Failure Mode & Effects Analysis (FMEA)?

In today’s fast-paced environment, the failure of a single business system can result in long production delays, heavy financial losses and even safety hazards. Yet, many business leaders take no preventive actions to keep their assets operational and safe, waiting until it’s too late to address failures and doing long-term damage to their business’ functionality and reputation.

Fortunately, there’s an effective way to identify and address potential failures with business assets and systems before they even occur. To prevent a catastrophic event, you can proactively perform failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) to identify every type of failure that can occur throughout your business processes. By identifying these failures and addressing the most concerning and costly ones with proper maintenance and inspections, your business can remain fully functional in the long-term.

But what is FMEA? And how do you analyze your core business operations effectively? Follow along in this comprehensive FMEA guide for everything you need to know. 

What Is FMEA? 

Failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) is a methodology for highlighting failure modes (ways in which an aspect of operations can go wrong) and how a specific type of failure can impact the rest of a business’ assets and systems. 

FMEA is a critical component of risk mitigation by identifying and addressing any potential issues that could hinder a business from operating at its full potential. Unlike root cause analysis (RCA), which involves analyzing a problem after it occurs, FMEA is a proactive approach to identifying and preventing problems before they occur. 

Key Goals of FMEA

For organizations with a lot of moving parts (literally and figuratively) to operate at a full capacity, FMEA is an essential aspect of ensuring business continuity. 

Here are two important objectives of performing FMEA:

1. Have response plans in place

Even with a proactive approach to equipment maintenance, asset failures will happen. In identifying all the types of failures that can occur, you can establish response plans for each to ensure heightened response times and a limited impact on full business operations. 

2. Use preventive maintenance during non-emergency situations 

Identifying how things can go awry with both facilities and assets makes it substantially easier to perform routine maintenance. These standard procedures can drastically reduce the likelihood of unexpected equipment  or infrastructure failure and prolong the lifecycle of core assets. 

Types of FMEAs

The U.S. military created and began implementing FMEAs in the 1950s as a way to create better weapons. Eventually, NASA adopted the existing process, and aerospace and automotive businesses followed suit. 

These are the three types of FMEAs and their various use cases for manufacturing businesses:

Functional Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FFMEA)

FFMEA (or Functional FMEA) analyzes the risks associated with how a business’ systems function and how specific parts can break. 

The goal is to prevent failure from happening in the first place by proactively determining which parts are most integral to business operations and scheduling preventative maintenance to keep them fully functional. 

Design Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (DFMEA)

DFMEA (or Design FMEA) analyzes an asset’s risks during the design phase. The goal is to identify potential failures that could occur before a piece of equipment is even deployed. 

This approach can ensure that infrastructure is built in a way that limits issues due to part malfunctions to ensure business continuity. 

Process Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (PFMEA)

PFMEA (or Process FMEA) is an analysis of all potential failures within a specific existing process (or portion of your business operations.)

This approach predicts what can go wrong during said process to ensure your most critical operations remain fully functional with recurring maintenance and inspections. 

How Can FMEAs Improve Maintenance?

Obviously, a business needs all of its equipment and facilities fully functional to operate effectively. FMEAs require some serious brainstorming around all aspects of your business operations and the types of challenges that would have the biggest hindrance on your performance. 

Once you identify potential problems that can be prevented with recurring maintenance, you can leverage a CMMS platform like Coast to manage asset maintenance and track work orders. 

And of course, the data collected about all of your assets on Coast will make for stronger FMEAs in the future. The following process steps are key in assisting maintenance teams with their FMEAs:

• Create preventative maintenance plans: Schedule maintenance months in advance and assign projects to your top maintenance team members.
• Prepare for emergency maintenance: Once your FMEAs determine the highest risk issues that can occur, you can build out emergency maintenance procedures for each of them within your CMMS. That way, you can move quickly when a failure occurs to get it alleviated immediately. 
• Prioritize corrective maintenance: When issues are discovered during routine inspections, correct them before they worsen.

FMEA Scores

The FMEA matrix provides scores for each of your assets to help with prioritization of the most critical ones you should be monitoring and performing routine maintenance on.

FMEA scores are based on three key scales that range from 0 to 10:

1. Failure severity: How much does failure of this component of your operations impact business continuity? A score of 0 indicates that it has no measurable impact, and a 10 means that the failure is hazardous and requires immediate attention. 
2. Failure probability: What is the likelihood that a failure will occur? In this case, 0 would be a failure that is unlikely to ever happen again, while 10 means the probability of failure is almost guaranteed. 
3. Failure detectability: How likely are you to detect that a failure has occurred? A score of 0 means that it’s almost guaranteed that you will detect the failure early on, and 10 means that the failure will be almost impossible to detect. 

Remember, the higher the score, the higher the maintenance action priority for the asset.

9-Step Process to Perform FMEAs

Here are the correct steps to take to perform failure mode and effect analysis across all of your business infrastructure to prioritize maintenance initiatives accordingly. 

• Step 1: Determine the type of FMEA you will perform.
• Step 2: Identify the possible failure modes.
• Step 3: Analyze the impacts this failure may have on the environment and customers/users.
• Step 4: Assign a severity score on the 0-10 scale.
• Step 5: Determine the failure’s expected frequency ranking on the 0-10 scale.
• Step 6: Assess how easy or difficult it will be to detect the cause of failure giving it a 0-10 detection score.
• Step 7: Calculate a risk priority number (RPN) by multiplying the severity score, the frequency score and the detection score.
• Step 8: Create a recommended action to reduce the likelihood of failure. The higher the number, the more resources you should invest in that risk management plan.
• Step 9: Run another RPN calculation after changes have been made.

Coast’s CMMS software makes it easy to record your FMEA score and schedule routine equipment or facility maintenance for your highest priority assets from a simplified digital platform. 

FMEA Example

Let’s suppose a conveyor belt plays a major role in your business’ operations. Here’s how you can do a risk assessment associated with a failure of the belt using the FFMEA approach:

Potential failure mode (a type of failure that could occur): Belt slippage

Potential causes of failure:

• Insufficient tension in the belt
• Contamination on belt or pulleys
• Worn out drive components (motor, gearbox)

Potential affects:

• Production delays or stoppage
• Damage to transported goods
• Safety hazards if belt suddenly accelerates

Calculate the FMEA score:

• Severity (S): High (9/10) due to potential for production downtime and safety risk
• Probability (P): Low to Medium (3/10) since regular maintenance practices are in place 
• Detectability (D): Low to Medium (3/10) since visual inspection occurs during routine checks

Using the Risk Priority Number (RPN) calculation (S × P × D), we get the following calculation: 9 x 3 x 3 = 81. This is considered high risk. 

Recommended actions:

• Increase frequency of tension checks and adjustments
• Implement regular cleaning of belt and pulleys to ensure product quality
• Monitor wear of drive components and replace proactively

Now that you know you need preventive maintenance, schedule employees to monitor the conveyor belt on a recurring basis via Coast. And remember, if adjustments are made to your conveyor belt systems, you should perform FMEA analysis again. 

Perform FMEAs the Right Way With Coast

Don’t allow potential failures to go undetected that leave your business non-operational and losing serious revenue. FMEAs are a vital part of protecting your assets and catching issues before they occur. 

To collect tangible data about failures across business systems and schedule preventive maintenance, sign up for Coast today.