Podcast: FMEA 101: Conducting Failure Modes and Effects Analysis

What is an FMEA? When should you use it? Why is it an important step in helping maintenance teams move from a break-fix maintenance state to one that's more proactive? In this episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast, Plant Services editor-in-chief Thomas Wilk spoke with a specialist in the reliability field, Brian Hronchek, to start answering these questions and more about failure modes and effects analyses. Brian draws from his former experience as a reliability engineer for U.S. Steel, maintenance manager for Exxon Mobil, and a 16-year veteran of the Marine Corps, in addition to his current work as a principal trainer and consultant at Eruditio.

Below is an excerpt from the podcast:

PS: Brian and I touched base about a week and a half ago at the MARCON event at the University of Tennessee's Reliability and Maintainability Center. We got talking about FMEAs and he was telling me a couple of occasions where he'd been with some clients and he had been able to work with them to demystify the whole process of what an FMEA was. And for a lot of listeners, you might already be familiar with FMEAs (we know we do serve the reliability community), but Brian and I thought, hey, you know what? Why not capture this conversation and podcast to share with everyone. So Brian, thank you especially for being here to talk about this topic.

BH: Not a problem, not a problem. This is just so much fun. You know, we love to see that light bulb moment when someone realizes, like, “ohh, it's so much easier, I got it” and then it becomes functional. So excited to share this today.

PS: Excellent, let's start with FMEA 101. For those for whom this is the first time encountering this term, what is an FMEA?

BH: FMEA stands for failure modes and effects analysis, and there's a modification of the tool, and this really what we're going to talk about, is the failure modes and effects criticality analysis, or FMECA. A failure modes and effects analysis is really useful for an OEM when they don't understand your operating context. But once you bring it into the operating context, then you can start to calculate or evaluate the impact on the business and determine which failure modes are more important than others. So we're going to talk failure modes and effects criticality analysis.

PS: When teams conduct an FMEA, when they use this tool, what is the eventual output of the tool? Are they looking for a specific number or is there a specific set of recommended actions? What should people expect to get once they conduct this exercise?

BH: Yeah, I know it's funny because we do so many things as reliability engineers, and somebody said we have to do this, and we do it, and then we put it on the shelf and we get absolutely no value out of it. So remember, everything that we do has to be taken to the next step. Eventually it has to be turned into value for the business, and the value for the business comes when people put their hands on the equipment and do something to it, right?

I hate to break this to everybody out there who has arrived at their executive position, their management position, their supervisor position. None of us have any value unless the operator and the mechanic put their hands on the machines, so the output of this is a strategy that can be turned into your maintenance plan in your CMMS, so that they can touch the machine.

PS: So it's more than a diagnostic tool, but there's more work to be done once you do complete it.

BH: Right.

PS: What would trigger an FMEA? Is it a machine that's constantly breaking down in a certain way? Is it something that you would do after you perform a criticality analysis?

BH: Oh, perfect, we're going to have so many light bulb moments today. I'm going to tell you right now we're going to so many moments. So let’s back up just a minute. The value of a reliability engineer again, it's when hands are put on the equipment. So what do we start with? We start with building a hierarchy. Why? So we can do criticality. Why? So we can build an asset strategy which includes FMEAs and you know PM optimization and part problem cause, all those things. Why? So we can build an equipment maintenance plan. Why? So it can be handed off to your planners to input into the CMMS so that the technicians can touch the machines in the right way at the right time.

There’s a string of things that have to happen, but you said something: when do we use it? Is it when something breaks down a lot or not? Or is it some other sort of analysis? Let's go back to the criticality tool and I'm going to tie together the criticality, the failure modes and effects analysis and your root cause analysis tool. What are the categories that are important to your business? What are they? What would they be?