About the FMEA Analysis Template
FMEA stands for Failure Mode and Effects Analysis. FMEA is a tool that helps organizations identify problems with a product, service, or process in order to assess their potential impact.
Customers expect the best. They want quality and consistency. But problems still arise — and they can be expensive. Finding a problem or defect late in the production cycle can be expensive and cause costly delays.
This FMEA analysis template enables you to discover potential issues before they impact the customer. Understand your potential failures and their associated risks, put together action plans to fix those problems, and evaluate the results of those action plans.
How to complete an FMEA analysis in 5 steps
The FMEA analysis template guides you through the systemic process of identifying risks in business processes. The template covers the following aspects:
Failure Mode - The way in which a process, product, or system could potentially fail. For example, a failure mode in a manufacturing process could be a machine malfunction, a software bug, or a material defect.
Effects - The consequences or outcomes resulting from the identified failure modes. This step involves assessing the impact of each failure mode on the overall process or system.
Analysis - This step involves a systematic and thorough examination of the identified failure modes and their effects. The goal is to understand the potential causes of failure and the implications for the overall system.
Here's a breakdown of how to use the template effectively:
Step 1: Pick the process
First, you need to identify the process you’d like to examine. This shouldn’t be a simple one or two-step process, but something more intricate with more downstream effects. Use your process map to review the steps in that process.
Step 2: Identify failure modes
Now, you need to brainstorm potential failure modes for each step — that is, any way in which that step might fail to perform its intended function.
Step 3: Estimate the impact
After you’ve identified each potential cause of a failure, you need to brainstorm potential effects associated with each failure mode. If the step fails, how will it impact the process, system, or product? Be as specific as possible.
Step 4: Assign a severity ranking
Now, you have to determine the potential damage of this failure occurring by assigning a Risk Priority Number (RPN). If this failure occurred, how severe would the impact be? Consider the impact on your customers, operations, or your employees. How frequently do you think this failure might occur? Is it likely to occur often? Or is it rare?
Step 5: Develop a plan
Finally, you need to develop a recommended action — or multiple actions — that deal with the problem. How can you go about fixing the problem, or reducing its severity? Who is responsible for fixing it? What does the timeline look like?
