Today, most manufacturing operations face time, budget, and expertise constraints. Every part of a system plays a role in the manufacturer’s success. And while failures in some areas may only be a minor inconvenience, failures in others can bring production grinding to a halt. That’s why failure mode, effects, and criticality analysis (FMECA) has become a standard way to analyze and prioritize potential failures. FMECA is a structured work priority system that helps teams make the best possible use of maintenance resources.
FMECA drives smart decisions about where to allocate your resources. In this article, we’ll talk about what FMECA is and what it can do for your operation. We’ll also explain the differences between FMECA and other work priority systems, like failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA).
What Is Failure Mode, Effects, and Criticality Analysis (FMECA)?
FMECA involves analyzing processes to determine their potential failure points and how those failure points impact the entire process. This information allows maintenance teams to prioritize work, predict failures, and maximize uptime since they can prioritize maintenance issues or perform preventive maintenance before interruptions occur.
FMECA is a data-driven work priority system. It is one of the most granular and systematic approaches to ranking maintenance tasks. FMECA consists of three parts, and each one feeds into the next:
- Failure mode identifies the points at which an asset or system can fail. Typically, there are multiple failure modes for every piece of equipment.
- Effects determine how each potential failure will impact operations. Not all failure modes are created equal. Some don’t significantly impact productivity, while others can bring the production line to a halt. It’s essential to know precisely which failure modes pose the most risk.
- Criticality analysis determines which failure modes are the most severe in terms of their effect on operations. This step takes into account productivity, safety, and environmental considerations.
Done right, FMECA can pinpoint the failure modes that matter most to a plant. Once that is determined, an organization can focus its efforts on the assets and components that need it the most.
Why Do We Perform FMECA?
Manufacturers have many machines and processes running across the production floor. At any given time, there may be multiple work orders for different assets that require repairs or parts that need to be replaced. Instead of making a gut decision about which repairs to prioritize, the FMECA approach gives supportable, data-driven insights on which repairs should be completed first.
FMECA gives each failure mode a criticality rating. When a maintenance team has multiple work orders, that rating allows them to prioritize the most critical repairs or maintenance needs. This allows teams to focus on the assets, components, and processes that need it most.
Teams can also use FMECA to improve preventive maintenance practices. Performing FMECA can help pinpoint common areas of failure. From there, the maintenance team can implement or tweak preventive maintenance practices to be more effective.
FMECA isn’t just about keeping your equipment up and running, although that’s clearly important. It can also help ensure the safety of your team members. An important aspect of the FMECA is ensuring that any breakdowns that threaten your team members’ physical safety receive top priority.
Similarly, FMECA enables teams to prioritize repairs that impact production quality or the asset’s performance. This minimizes downtime and ensures the production floor continues running as effectively as possible.
FMECA also supports the longevity of your equipment and assets by identifying critical repairs and ensuring they are handled immediately and effectively.
How To Perform FMECA: A Step-by-Step Process
Now that we’ve gone over what FMECA stands for and why it’s important, it’s time to put our knowledge into practice. Performing FMECA can be time-consuming, but the benefits will have a long-lasting impact on your company.
It may take a wide range of people in various roles throughout your organization to perform an effective FMECA analysis. These could include engineers, technicians, maintenance staff, product managers and designers, manufacturing personnel, and more. Each of these areas of expertise can help identify and mitigate failure modes, resulting in a more thorough and effective FMECA analysis.
Here are the steps you can take:
- Define the scope of your analysis: Identify the system or process you want to analyze. This could be a single manufacturing asset or the entire manufacturing process.
- Identify the components: Break the system or process down into each part or subsystem.
- Identify potential failures: Brainstorm every possible failure mode, from small to large.
- Identify the effects of each failure: For each failure, determine the possible effects. These could include injuries, damaged machinery, unplanned downtime, quality issues, and more.
- Assign each failure a severity rating: Severity scores typically range from 1-10, with 1 representing a minor issue and 10 representing a severe issue. Severity ratings can represent financial loss, equipment damage, safety issues, etc.
- Assign each failure an occurrence rating: Give each failure an occurrence rating from 1-10, with 1 being the least likely to occur and 10 being extremely likely to occur.
- Assign each failure a detection rating: The detection rating is the likelihood of each failure being detected, with 1 meaning that it is highly likely to be detected and 10 meaning that it will go undetected.
- Calculate the risk priority number (RPN): Multiply the severity rating, the occurrence rating, and the detection rating for each failure (severity rating x occurrence rating x detection rating = RPN). The resulting number is the risk priority number. Higher risk priority numbers represent higher-impact failures, while lower numbers represent failures that are less likely to occur or less damaging when they do occur.
- Prioritize and implement actions: Develop and prioritize actions to mitigate or eliminate the risk of higher RPN failures occurring. This could include updating or adding preventive maintenance procedures, improving environmental controls, adding protective devices or safeguards, etc.
- Monitor and review: Monitor the system for new FMECA failure modes and evaluate the effectiveness of the actions implemented.
FMECA is an iterative process. It should be repeated periodically to see how effective your mitigation procedures are and to take lessons learned into consideration. Continuous improvement is key to ensuring your FMECA remains an effective, relevant resource for your organization.
Pros and Cons of FMECA Analysis
FMECA can be a useful tool for companies looking to gain a deeper understanding of potential issues and improve existing processes. Performing this analysis can:
- Reveal links between failures and results, providing a clearer picture of how failures impact the rest of the factory and allow maintenance teams to take measures to reduce the likelihood of failure.
- Allow the factory to implement preventive measures and reduce the risk of failures, leading to reduced downtime and increased system reliability.
- Help prioritize both preventive and corrective maintenance tasks, ensuring the most effective use of maintenance resources.
- Provide data that can be used to aid efficiency and effectiveness in plant operations, such as identifying which assets could be candidates for predictive maintenance.
- Ensure a safer working environment for employees by reducing or removing safety risks.
- Identify weaknesses in current practices across the system, leading to overall improvements.
Even though FMECA analysis can be useful to identify and mitigate potential issues in a factory, it comes with a few drawbacks:
- Can be time-consuming to gather and analyze all the data required.
- Can be costly because it requires a cross-functional team of experts to complete it effectively.
- Needs to be completed more than once in order to make adjustments and produce continuous improvements. For example, after the initial completion, a team may need to complete a second FMECA when changes are made to assets or systems, or when major process changes occur.
- Requires managing and organizing a large amount of data, which can be difficult for companies that use traditional paper systems or siloed digital applications.
While there can be barriers to performing FMECA, the long-term benefits of the analysis and the changes that result often outweigh the costs. To get the maximum benefit, it’s important to determine the best time to conduct FMECA and make sure you do it in a complete way.
When Should You Perform an FMECA Analysis?
Conducting FMECA can be incredibly useful to your organization, but it can also be time-consuming and costly. And while continuous improvement is the goal, it doesn’t make sense to use the resources to perform FMECA more frequently than needed.
However, there are a few key times when conducting FMECA is most beneficial to an organization:
- Prior to beginning manufacturing: When a system is still in the design phase, performing an FMECA analysis allows the engineering team to tweak designs and assets and make other changes to ensure the system runs as effectively as possible from the moment it’s up and running.
- To improve reliability: An FMECA analysis can be performed during the production phase, while the facility is operating normally. It can provide actionable insights into changes that can be made to improve operations.
- After system upgrades or changes: When assets are upgraded or major changes are made to manufacturing systems or procedures, it makes sense to repeat an FMECA analysis to get ahead of any potential failures that may have been introduced by the changes.
- After a major failure: When a major failure has occurred, performing FMECA can help reveal the root cause of the problem and improve reliability and safety by identifying corrective actions that should be taken to avoid it happening again.
- During maintenance planning: An FMECA analysis can assist maintenance teams when creating or updating preventive maintenance scheduling. The maintenance team can use it to create an optimal preventive maintenance schedule for each asset and analyze which assets or systems are most important. It can also be performed to help identify the best candidates for predictive maintenance.
Which Roles Use FMECA Results?
There are many roles whose day-to-day operations are directly impacted by FMECA results. They include:
- Engineers and designers: These employees will use FMECA results to make changes to the design or operation of a factory to help reduce the risk of failures and improve system performance.
- Maintenance engineers and personnel: These employees use FMECA to make changes or improvements to predictive, preventive, and corrective maintenance practices.
- Safety engineers: The results of an FMECA analysis help these employees ensure products and systems are safe for use, and may use FMECA analysis to make improvements to processes to ensure safety.
- Regulatory compliance officers: Can use FMECA results to demonstrate compliance with safety and quality standards.
- Operations managers: FMECA analysis helps operations managers use identify failure modes and develop strategies to mitigate the failures.
Other roles, such as risk management professionals and quality assurance teams, may also benefit from an FMECA analysis. These roles all use FMECA results in various ways, and their expertise in improving operations throughout the facility can have a long-term impact on the reliability and performance of operations.
Since many of these roles are also important to the development of an FMECA analysis, the process of conducting the analysis can be a good way to capture and document the knowledge these professionals bring to the organization, ensuring the entire team can benefit from their insights.
What Is the Difference Between FMECA and FMEA?
Failure mode and effect analysis (FMEA) is a close cousin of FMECA. Like FMECA, FMEA identifies possible failures and then studies the potential ripple effect of each failure.
It can be helpful to think of FMECA as the next stage after FMEA. FMEA identifies a wide range of potential failures that could affect the production line, but FECMA provides an actionable plan for each failure.
FMECA brings in more data to determine the concrete impact of each failure mode. This allows teams to give each potential failure a criticality rating, which is how to determine which components and assets are the most critical to operations. For example, a reliability engineer looking to start a predictive maintenance program might use FMECA to determine where best to launch their wireless vibration sensor pilot, or even where to focus maintenance efforts in general.
Ideally, operations should employ both FMEA and FMECA. Together, the two approaches identify failure modes, determine their impact on the final product, and make the best possible use of maintenance resources.
Using a CMMS for FMECA
FMECA is one of the most data-driven work priority systems available. That’s why a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) like eMaint is a natural fit for managing FMECA analysis. FMECA makes predictions about future maintenance needs. But it needs plenty of detailed, accurate data to make those predictions, which is where eMaint comes in.
eMaint effortlessly stores work order data and makes it easy to search that data. When you’re setting up FMECA, you can use eMaint’s reporting function to build your list of failure modes. You can also use eMaint’s failure codes to determine how often failures occur.
eMaint’s work order and reporting features also let you pinpoint the impact of past machine failures. Which failures had a domino effect on other assets? Which caused your operation to shut down? Use these insights to predict and prevent the impact of each failure mode.
Once you’ve determined the failure modes and their effects, you can conduct your criticality analysis.
How Does Asset Criticality Analysis Work?
The final step to implementing FMECA is creating a solid asset criticality analysis. Ultimately, that’s how to best determine where to direct maintenance resources.
You should first focus maintenance resources on potential failures that are severe enough to impact safety or operations. Don’t get bogged down trying to prepare for very rare problems or even common problems that don’t significantly impact operations.
Criticality analysis is probably the most important piece of FMECA, so it’s worth taking the time to implement it correctly. Partnering with experienced providers who can help your team can also be a good idea.
Working with the Experts on FMECA and Criticality Analysis
The experts at Fluke Reliability offer training for teams working to implement FMECA. The training covers key FMECA topics like:
- Failure modes
- Severity of failure modes
- Probability of occurrence
- Risk priorities
By the end of our five-day FMECA training, your teams will have done a comprehensive review of potential component failures and their effects. You’ll also learn which maintenance tasks your teams should focus on to minimize the chances of the most severe failure modes taking place.
Such training is a great way to start shifting to a structured, data-driven decision-making process. And before long, you’ll likely see changes across your whole operation, leading to greater productivity and less unplanned downtime.
To learn more about FMECA training and how a CMMS can help optimize your maintenance plan, speak to an eMaint specialist.