Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) systematically lists potential failures and their impacts — scoring severity, occurrence, and detectability to prioritize mitigation actions before production.

What Is FMEA?

• Definition: Systematic analysis of potential failure modes.
• Process: Identify failure modes, assess effects, score risks, prioritize actions.
• Purpose: Proactive reliability improvement, risk reduction.

FMEA Steps: Identify failure modes, determine effects, assess severity (S), estimate occurrence (O), evaluate detectability (D), calculate RPN = S×O×D, prioritize high RPN items, implement mitigation.

Scoring (1-10): Severity (1=minor, 10=catastrophic), Occurrence (1=rare, 10=frequent), Detectability (1=easy to detect, 10=undetectable).

Risk Priority Number (RPN): Product of S×O×D (range: 1-1000), higher RPN = higher priority.

Applications: Product design, process development, supplier qualification, continuous improvement.

Benefits: Proactive risk identification, quantified prioritization, documented analysis, cross-functional collaboration.

FMEA is proactive checklist — turning expert judgment into quantifiable risk priorities to prevent reliability issues from reaching the field.