Most of the articles on FMEAs or FMECAs discuss in qualitative terms how useful, how important it is to do a FMEA or FMECA - but I am finding very few studies that explicitly evaluate whether a FMEA or FMECA was worth the effort or whether it was done correctly or how it was shown to impact later failures etc.
Good thughts. I have been looking at several Chinese and European studies where they were asking the right questions to start evalutiating FMEAs/FMECAs - for example, we've spent this effort and here is what benefits we seem to get from using the FMECA. What is surprising is how little people are doing to evaluate the benefit of FMECAs or other approaches/methodologies of this sort.
I have found an older reference (127 page, 1993 FMECA Report from the Reliability Analysis Center - Rome, NY) that seems to provide detailed guidance on how to build an effective FMECA for an application. Based on my prior FMECA experience, I think that this is useful. Let me know if it works for you.
Here is the link for you.
http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a278508.pdf
Hi Eric, and nice to meet you. I have lots of articles on how to do a good FMECA, and I have even reviewed good FMECAs,but what I am looking for are analyses explicitly studying the value of the FMECA for a given application (be it system or process - a lot of FMECAs are now used for medical processe. The issue is to have real data on whether doing a FMECA, even well, was demonstrably effective- did it for example, lead to a system which had less failures later, or less rework on a design. There are lots of just-so stories, and those are valuable but I'd like to see real evidence backing up the experience we have all had. Why? because as you know in government, there are more and more programs saying prove to me that it is worthwhile to do a FMEA or a TEST PLAN or...you name your favorite document.
Kirstie, what you are looking for is something that we have needed for a long time. I have not yet found a reference that explicitly which does an analysis of a FMEA/FEMECA with details on its implementation results (or whether the effort is helpful in the long term), but I will continue to look and if/when I find one, I will send it to you.
Thank-you Eric! I need more eyes looking this. And since you are looking :-), please tell me if you also run across any again explicit studies on th effectveness or value-added of different kinds of tests (e.g., unit, integration, SIQT, system level, TLYF, etc.). Thank-you again for your interest and I wll tell you of any progress.
Kirstie, I found a book written in 2012 that may interest you:
Effective FMEAs: Achieving Safe, Reliable, and Economical Products and Processes Using Failure Mode and Effects Analysis, First Edition. Carl S. Carlson.
© 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Chapter 9 in this book is entitled: Lessons Learned for Effective FMEAs
Chapter 10 is: How to Facilitate Successful FMEA Projects
Chapter 12 deals with FMECA. I have included an excerpt of Chapter one of this book. I will continue to look for you!
http://media.johnwiley.com.au/product_data/excerpt/33/11180074/1118007433-297.pdf
Thanks Eric. :-) but keep looking. I have read several things by him on the web that were full of wisdom but with no actualy case studies or data or evidence for his pearls. I have found so far world-wide four studies on the actual impact of the FMEA on error rates etc. with mixed results. But at least they were actually trying. So a further question for you, in your agency do your contracts require certain docs (CDRLs) such as FMEA/FMECA or SW development plans? If so, how do you decide which ones are essential to include?
Kirstie, my agency is generally 'flexible' with what is required on contracts (CDRLs) with respect to documentation, which from my perspective and experience is not a good thing. If you look in my RG page, you will see a software QA guidance document that I developed and used on two of my contracts, because of lack of such 'nuts and bolts' guidance available before I developed it (you can download the document). I had both contractors incorporate the document into their contract workplans in its entirety. I 'micromanaged' one of the contractors with the document and was able to revive a computer model that had not been working before I applied that document and my software development experience. The guidance document provided me with a framework to implement high-quality software project management principles (in 6 pages).
I know that only one of my colleagues (former DOD civilian) understands what a FMEA or FMECA is and the rest do not know, so they can not appreciate what those processes bring to system development (while we use contractors to develop software and models for us with no systematic guidance). My colleagues are mostly analytical chemists or scientists who are unaware of Mil-STD-1521 or Mil-STD-499 development and analysis principles. Trying to impose consistency and discipline in systems development in this environment is difficult.
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