

In today's competitive market environment, the industry has realized the fact that servicing unreliable products is a very costly proposition. To a large extent, reliability is built into the product during the design and development phase. Failure Mode & Effects Analysis (FMEA) is an essential ingredient of reliability engineering and is a very powerful and effective technique used for improvement in design, assembly, materials engineering, servicing etc., in a diverse range of manufacturing activities. FMEA can be effectively applied in case of new developments, new technologies and components/assemblies or products which have inherent problems showing up in practice.
'Failure Mode & Effects Analysis' (FMEA) is an "error prevention" oriented and proactive methodology that tries to pre-empt the occurrence of errors; reduce their significance ( even if they were bound to occur ) and in unavoidable circumstances, to increase the chance of error detection, so that the process could then be suitably controlled. FMEA is an aid for continuous improvement which fits into a PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) pattern of activity. Whenever changes in product or processes or vendor / supplier are envisaged or effected, FMEA is redone to evaluate their effects.