FMECA - AN INTEGRATED APPROACH

FMECA (Failure Modes, Effects and Criticality Analysis) is an engineering analysis and a core activity performed by reliability engineers to review the effects of probable failure modes of components and assemblies of the system on system performance. The FMECA is a powerful system analysis tool and is used as an input for Logistic Support Analysis, Test Requirements Document, Fault Trees, BIT Analysis and Safety Analysis. Most contracts issued by the Department of Defense require all these data from different engineering disciplines. Only limited effort has been made to integrate these data. Experience has shown that the customer receives these data from different groups within the supplier organization - often generated by redundant efforts. This duplication of effort adds costs. This problem was recognized and a two step approach was developed to ameliorate the situation. The first step was to improve the FMECA analysis and format; the second was to develop software which can be used to transfer data for various reports to eliminate duplication of effort. Various software packages available on the market were reviewed but none met the integration objective while retaining the conventional flexible and tabular format used by most engineers. FMECA is one of the costly exercises performed by reliability engineers and, as such, improving the quality and reducing the overall cost is crucial. This paper documents the approach developed to improve the FMECA analysis and its documentation, enabling it to be fed into other analyses (BIT analysis, LSAB sheets, Fault Tree and TRD) via automation to meet TQM (Total Quality Management) objectives.