Advantages and Limitations of FMEAs
FMEAs can be developed for single items or for systems that consist of thousands of parts. Although FMEAs were once created by manually completing worksheets, they are now often generated using computerised spreadsheets or software packages designed specifically for FMEA development. Moving FMEA development from paper to computer has provided for:
• Generating FMEAs more quickly and accurately.
• Editing and updating information easily as the design changes.
• Modifying design options, viewpoints and input assumptions.
• Automating report preparation, including sensitivity analyses.
• Interacting with other software for graphic presentation, word-processing and the use of databases containing reliability information.
• Ranking effects in criticality order, at different system levels, in different phases of system operation or from different viewpoints.
FMEA software programs provide for creating, storing, retrieving and modifying common FMEA data elements, using uniform terminology and documentation templates for consistency, and applying changes globally. And, most importantly, FMEA software programs free engineers to concentrate on the engineering principles required for FMEAs rather than on formatting and consistency issues. The “downside” of this is that the analyst sometimes loses sight of the underlying technical issues in the design itself while concentrating on data input. Sometimes the “numbers” become over-important at the expense of common sense.