Epicenter Newsletter - Vol. 5 No. 3

Have you ever said to yourself "That's an accident waiting to happen?" That's probably a sign that you are aware of a potentially dangerous situation that hasn't yet occured. This month's featured tool, Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA), was initially developed by the US military in the 1940's as a structured approach to help prevent those "accidents" from happening. Since then, the tool has been successfully used within a variety of industries from healthcare to manufacturing to software development.

Essentially, the goal of the FMEA process is to guide a team through a series of questions to identify those key processes that need to be focused upon and controlled to eliminate critical product or service issues. Once the team has identified the key processes, the tool also acts as the basis for documenting the control systems and ongoing process improvements. Today's article will focus upon the first part of the process where the Risk Priority Numbers (RPNs) are generated.

FMEA Process - Part I - Identifying RPN's

Risk Priority Numbers (RPNs) are a metric for gaging the likelihood and impact of a potential issues. The higher the number, the more likely it is that a severe issue will occur. RPNs are generated using the following process:

Once you have collected this information into a spreadsheet, the RPN number is simply the:

Severity (#5) x Frequency of Occurance (#7) x Rate of Detectability (#9). In our example, the worst RPN score would be "1000" or 10 x 10 x 10.

Example Application: Very Severe issues that occur Moderately Frequently and Require Gaging to Detect might be an RPN score of 432 (9 x 6 x 8).

Next month, we will continue with the discussion of the FMEA process and how the RPN scores are used to reduce risk and/or improve processes.

Considerations:

Although this article only covers the use of FMEA for processes, the tool can also be used to evaluate product designs and organizational issues.
As always, practice makes perfect. Try the tool and, if it is of value to your organization, incorporate it into your standard processes for developing products, desiging operations and/or improving operations.
The FMEA process should be part of a continuous improvement process. As actions are taken to reduce risk, the team should revisit the FMEA analysis to identify new processes to focus upon.
More information on the FMEA process is available at Wikipedia with the following LINK.
For more information on Epicenter's capabilities in the area of process design and improvement, please visit us at www.epicentergroup.com.

Next Steps:

If you are interested in learning more about how Epicenter can help your organization to become more effective, please do not hesitate to e-mail us at tzubic@epicentergroup.com or call Tracee Zubic at 216.548.7136.