Advantages of FMEAs
Effective FMEAs identify all failure modes and their effects and indicate how critical failure modes can either be eliminated or their effects lessened to make designs more reliable and safe. In addition to providing quality and safety enhancements, other advantages of FMEAs include:
• Increased customer satisfaction due to better products and processes.
• More robust designs that consider poor customer habits and less than ideal operating environments.
• Earlier preparation of diagnostic routines (such as check lists, flow charts and fault-finding tables) for fault recovery, fault tolerance, and failure detection and isolation.
• More efficient test and production planning based on the possibility of product-induced failures.
• Better design of built-in test (BIT), failure indications and redundancy (where applicable and necessary).
• Earlier determination of the automatic or manual test equipment needed to economically test hardware, particularly electronic sub-assemblies and systems, and diagnose failures.
• Superior placement of performance monitoring and fault-sensing equipment or test points.
• Earlier development of software for automatic test and BIT.
• Better preventative maintenance requirements based on the significance of failure effects.
• Fewer engineering changes in the prototyping and manufacturing stages of product development, where costs can be more significant.
• Comprehensive design documentation that formally records safety and reliability analysis in case evidence is ever required by customers or for product safety litigation.
By focusing attention on design weaknesses and what can go wrong in the manufacturing and support of a product, FMEAs play a central role in product or process design.