FMEA for the Department of Defense
It amazes me as to the usefulness of FMEA across many industries. I am sitting in the lobby of a major defense contractor for the second day of a FMEA risk mitigation event for the Hummer replacement. The new designs are intended to reduce the effectiveness of IED’s or Improvised Explosive Devices. The FMEA is being used to reduce the probability of failure of various systems as they contribute to the potential failure. In other words a systems approach. Some systems have greater responsibility to deliver protection and survivability than others, but all are responsible for some of the functional requirement.
The outputs of FMEA in these examples are extracted from the FMEA and managed through a risk management method embedded within the project management system. This is a great way to get the value from FMEA and then populate the Design Reviews with the actions, responsibility and timing. Follow-up is most likely to occur in these cases. This is a major flaw with using FMEA alone as some folks simply forget to review the actions in a timely way.
Always remember to update the FMEA after the actions have been taken as this assures future considerations of the actions taken in new FMEA development.