In an effort to define a broad, widely accepted standard for performing FMEAs, the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) published ARP 5580. Created by a sub-committee of professionals that included representatives of government, industry and academia, this FMEA standard reflects not only commercial practices but also meets the strict guidelines of the Department of Defense (DoD).

By combining the capabilities of MIL-STD-1629 and the Automotive FMEAs, this sub-committee was able to produce a FMEA standard that is widely accepted across military and commercial barriers. The most notable difference in ARP 5580 is the support of fault equivalence groups, which allow the focus to be on the management of failure consequences rather than on individual failure modes.

Although the traditional approach of analysing individual failure modes is very systematic and complete, it can become very tedious, especially when performing a FMEA on a large or complex system. To automate and simplify the development of any FMEA, ARP 5580 suggests grouping failure modes that exhibit identical consequences together and assigning them to the same Fault Identification Number (FIN). The failure modes having the same FIN all must have exactly the same consequences, including the same local effect, next effect, end effect and severity. Using fault equivalence groups can greatly reduce repetition and improve consistency.