Control plans help you to manufacture quality products by providing a structured approach for specifying and implementing control methods for the system. A control plan describes a method used to identify and minimize variations in the manufacturing process. Initially, its primary purpose is to describe a plan for process control, but once the product has reached manufacturing, the control plan can be modified to ensure product quality and control the process. Control plans are intended to be living documents modified throughout the manufacturing process as both the system and control methods are assessed and amended.

Control plans are used in conjunction with FMEAs. The FMEA determines the aspects of the product that require control, while control plans describe the processes by which these aspects are kept within an acceptable quality level. Typically, FMEA failure mode causes help to determine what controls are needed. For example, if the SRAM section of a microprocessor fails due to a metal-to-metal short, you might want to implement additional controls on the SRAM manufacturing line.

Because control plans provide a structured methodology for evaluating a product and its manufacturing processes, they improve the quality of the product and help to reduce waste. When writing control plans, you can choose to focus on controlling the aspects of the product most important to the customer. As a result, control plans also help to improve customer satisfaction.

In the FMEA module, you can associate control plans with any number of records in the FMEA Tree Items and FMEA Worksheet tables. You can also associate any record in the FMEA Tree Items or FMEA Worksheet table with multiple control plans. The ability to have a many-to-many relationship between control plans and records in these two FMEA tables means that you can create associations in any manner that you want. Additionally, you can create user-defined calculations to aggregate values for control plan fields.