The Quality Blog

Why bother doing a FMEA if the result cannot be shared. FMEA is for collaboration not for proprietary.

Discovering failure and acting on it has a 10 times cost savings impact – 1 dollar prevention equals at least 10 dollars savings.

http://www.devicelink.com/expo/qexpo09/Q301.html – QAI Speaking… Take a Look!

Planning for quality is the key to success. A plan musty be written, based on whats new or changed problems in the past and Noise factors.

An excellent comment on the blog made me think of an underpass on a Detroit highway. Driving down the road I found that  road was flooded. Being the weird individual that I am and having read a comment about the discussion being the most important thing in an FMEA, I logically saw an analogy of the flood to the FMEA process.

Water will flow unobstructed based on Gravity. Water will flow out in quite a few directions simultaneously. As the water spreads it covers a lot of area. Teams work in the same way. All kinds of info and discussions can take place spreading out, thinking of every possible thing that can go wrong.

That is the problem, all the discussion is like water spreading out in all directions. We are not getting it where we need it. FMEA is like plumbing. FMEA channels the water like in irrigation to the crops that need it most, It is like plumbing in that there may be differing directions that I want the water to flow, not everywhere. Too many times teams sit down with a blank form and go for it and end in despair due to hour long discussions only to end with, but that wont  happen because we did this thing or followed this practice. How frustrating. FMEA is very effective, but the planning for the experience is every bit as important as its’ outcome.

I am at Ford Today, working on all the assembly plant operations for three new or significantly changed product lines. Ford has always been in the forefront of FMEA use and it is still true today. The techniques we are using here would not necessarily be recognized by the vast majority of FMEA users out there. In fact, the fmea’s being developed for complete assembly plants are quite manageable in size, not what you would expect from past line by line development activity. Why?????

We have leaned out the FMEA process by seperating the knowns as legacy and focus only on the change bothe incidental and intentional. For those of you in the know Incidental and Intentional Change are the primary things that Toyota looks as as well in DRBFM (Design Review Based on Failure Modes).

By seperating what is known and turned into standard work, The Lean FMEA technique only looks at the:

• New Operations
• Changes to Operations
• Past Failures
• Incidental change due to Noise Factors like environment or operator preferences.

Process assesmbly FMEA is now quick and quite effective as the ratio of actions to line items is much greater. This is due to more emphasis, focus and attention applied to the subset of what is probable (changes) and discounting the possibles where no change is likely to drive failure where it did not exist before.

In the future Ford will probably adopt Lean FMEA for all assembly in Vehicle Operations, and we will be there to continue the relentless never ending task of making FMEA and other quality tools more efficient and effective.

Just a note to all who follow along – we are creating new videos for the website that answer the top 10 questions about FMEA and other topics. What are your preferred topics? Let me know.

We have been pioneering new techniques like matrices to use as legacy documents used in preparation of FMEA’s. These matrices (Design and Process) are used to work out what needs to be included on the FMEA form for analysis but keeping the vast majority of known causes and failure modes off of the FMEA after reviweing them for appropriateness with the core team prior to FMEA develoment. This is not a generic FMEA, which gets larger with time. This approach allows FMEA’s to get shorter in time while still being thourough with all known causes being considered. Comments and questions are welcomed. I am getting up to speed with the latest technology and as such I am inviting you to follow me on Twiiter and Facebook

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Is developing video clips for our newly designed website!