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Abstract
The FMEA has long been considered the preferred approach to assess and mitigate risk during design and manufacturing processes. However in practice, FMEA's are often a static document, are frequently the basis for registrar audit findings, and simply are not executed to meet the intent of the FMEA process. FMEA's are created to satisfy customer deliverables, third party registrar audits, and PPAP (Production Part Approval Process) requirements, however FMEA's often fail to deliver risk mitigation and defect prevention benefits claimed in most FMEA training and FMEA instruction documents. After observing this phenomenon in the automotive industry, this researcher used a qualitative design to determine the factors that hinder the FMEA process and lead to static FMEA's that fails to deliver the intended dynamic risk assessment.
This study used a phenomenological based research design to investigate the factors and underlying conditions that lead to poor execution of the FMEA process and to poor development of the FMEA document. Participants were also asked to offer suggestions or alternate methods to assess risk in lieu of the FMEA process. In this study, 13 participants were interviewed; each of these participants are engineers from Tier 1 automotive manufacturing facilities and are responsible to lead and develop FMEA's for current automotive components. The study was limited to the automotive industry and those engineers that have experience in FMEA development and have received formal training in the FMEA process.
1. Introduction
Failure mode and effects analysis has been an accepted risk assessment tool since introduction of MIL-P-1629 by the military in 1949. This document was a comprehensive method and established the "requirements and procedures for performing a failure mode, effects, and criticality analysis (FMECA) to systematically evaluate and document, by item failure mode analysis, the potential impact of each functional or hardware failure on mission success, personnel and system safety, system performance, maintainability, and maintenance requirements." (MIL-STD-1629A). The standard has since been cancelled (MIL-STD-1629A Note 3, 1998), however the methodology has been adapted by numerous industries including the automotive industry in the 1980's. The Automotive Industry Action Group published Potential Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) in 1993 (Automotive Industry Action Group, 2008), which represented a collaborative effort involving Ford, Chrysler (currently FCA LLC) and General Motors. This reference...