Failure mode, effects, & criticality analysis (FMECA) is a structured work priority system that helps teams make the best possible use of maintenance resources. 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, in others they can bring production grinding to a halt.
Today, FMECA is a standard way to analyze and prioritize potential failures. FMECA drives smart decisions about where to allocate your resources so that they have the most impact. 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. Once you’ve identified those failure points, you can investigate how they 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 production to a standstill. It’s essential to know 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 productivity, safety, and environmental considerations into account.
Done right, FMECA can pinpoint the failure modes that matter most to a plant. Once those are determined, an organization can focus its maintenance efforts on the assets and components that need it the most.
Why Do We Perform FMECA?
The goal of performing a failure mode, effects, and criticality analysis is to better understand potential risks and find ways to prevent failures before they happen. Performing FMECA lets organizations:
- Gain supportable, data-driven insights: 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 strategizes which repairs or preventive maintenance tasks teams should complete first.
- Focus on high-priority tasks: 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 work orders. Teams can focus on the assets, components, and processes that need it most.
- 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.
- Ensure workplace safety: An important aspect of FMECA is ensuring that any breakdowns that threaten your team members’ physical safety receive top priority.
- Minimize downtime: 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.
- Improve equipment lifespan: 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, and manufacturing personnel. 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 for performing an FMECA analysis:
1. 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.
2. Identify All Relevant Factors
- 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.
3. Assign Ratings
- 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 be based on 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 that each failure will be detected, with 1 meaning that it is highly likely to be detected and 10 meaning that it will go undetected.
4. 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.
5. 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, or adding protective devices or safeguards.
6. 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.
What Are the 3 Types of FMECA?
There are three main types of FMECA. Each type helps organizations proactively address reliability and safety concerns, but they are focused on different areas.
1. System FMECA
This type of FMECA is focused on high-level systems rather than specific components. It’s used to evaluate how failures in functions impact the overall operation, and is useful in the early design stages when physical components haven’t been fully defined.
System FMECA example: Analyzing how a failure in a cooling system function could lead to overheating in a plant.
2. Design FMECA
Design FMECA focuses on examining individual hardware and components within a system. It identifies how failures such as a broken circuit or a damaged bearing could affect the system. It’s often used in manufacturing to improve reliability.
Design FMECA example: Analyzing how a failed capacitor in a power supply affects an electrical circuit.
3. Process FMECA
This type of FMECA examines potential failures in manufacturing processes. It helps locate pain points in assembly, production, or maintenance procedures and is useful for improving quality control.
Process FMECA example: Analyzing how incorrect torque settings during assembly could lead to premature bolt failure.
The basic steps for performing a failure mode, effects, and criticality analysis remain the same for all three types of FMECA: identify potential failure modes, determine the effects, prioritize failure modes, and develop strategies to reduce the impact of failures.
What Is an FMECA Failure Mode?
A failure mode in FMECA refers to the specific way in which a component, subsystem, or system can fail. It describes what goes wrong, not necessarily why it happens.
Some FMECA examples of failure modes include a motor overheating, a circuit shorting out, or a bolt loosening over time. Each of these is a different failure mode because they represent different ways a system could fail.
Once you know the possible failure modes, you can determine the effects, causes, and criticality and take steps to avoid these failures.
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?
There are a few key times when conducting FMECA is most beneficial to an organization:
- Before manufacturing begins: 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: Teams can perform an FMECA analysis during the production phase while the facility is operating normally. It can provide actionable insights and highlight potential changes 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 changes may have introduced.
- 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: 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 to production. It can also be performed to help identify the best candidates for predictive maintenance.
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.
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 specialists 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 safety engineers 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 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 FMECA 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 they 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 use 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.
Here’s a table outlining the differences between FMEA and FMECA:
What Is the FMEA Method of Analysis?
The FMEA method of analysis is very similar to the FMECA method. However, the FMEA stops before getting to the criticality analysis and doesn’t rank failures according to their impact.
FMEA focuses on understanding risk failures and their effects, but FMECA takes this a step further by quantifying risks and assessing the criticality of the failure. While FMEA is a good starting point for FMECA, FMECA allows teams to extend their analysis and improve their decision-making to improve reliability and safety.
How Does FMECA Criticality Analysis Work?
The final step to implementing FMECA is determining the criticality of each defined failure. The criticality helps prioritize repairs and mitigation strategies, and can be based on the RPN number calculated previously. Higher numbers mean that the failure is more likely to occur and/or that failures are more damaging and impactful when they do occur, while lower numbers mean that failure is unlikely and, even if it did happen, it wouldn’t have a high impact on other areas of production.
This is not the same as an asset criticality analysis. However, both FMECA and an asset criticality analysis can help you determine where to direct maintenance resources.
In addition to the risk priority number, you can ask these additional questions to help you determine failure criticality:
- How much would downtime affect production or output?
- Could failure lead to injuries, fatalities, or environmental damage?
- How expensive and difficult is it to repair the asset?
- Does failure violate industry regulations or compliance?
- Are there backup systems in place?
You should first focus maintenance resources on potential failures that are severe enough to impact safety or immediate operations. Don’t get bogged down trying to prepare for very rare problems or even common problems that don’t significantly undermine production.
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.
Using a CMMS for FMECA
FMECA is one of the most data-driven work priority systems available, and it’s easier to implement with the right tools. 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.
With eMaint, you can:
- Effortlessly store and search work order data
- Use the reporting function to build a list of failure modes
- Use eMaint failure codes to determine how often failures occur
eMaint has work order and reporting features that 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.
Working with the Experts on FMECA
The experts at Fluke Reliability offer an asset criticality workshop 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.
This 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.