Overview

Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) is a name given to a group of activities which are performed to ensure that all that could potentially go wrong with a product has been recognized and that actions are taken to prevent things from going wrong.

In the 1960s, the moon flight program engineers, faced with staggering consequences of malfunctioning space vehicles, devised a method of forecasting the problems that could occur with every component. They were thinking beyond the normal design considerations, all the way to the most bizarre situations one could devise. They did this in long and concentrated brainstorming sessions. The result of this approach contributed to the success of the moon landing in 1969.

With the decline of the space program in the early 1970s, many NASA engineers found jobs in other industries and brought failure forecasting with them. The technique became known eventually as the FMEA. In 1972, NAAO, a Quality Assurance organization, developed the original reliability training program which included a module on the execution of FMEA.

Although good engineers have always performed an FMEA type of analysis on their designs, most of their efforts were documented only in the form of their final parts and assembly drawings. Repetition of past mistakes, however, was possible, because people were assigned to other tasks, left the company, etc. With liability insurance besieging, for instance, the automotive industry in the 1970s, FMEA became a natural tool to lower the occurrence of failures. Since that time, the discipline has...