About Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA)

The purpose of a Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) is to identify potential risks, to classify these risks, and optionally take corrective actions to prevent them. An analysis can be realized in one-off hazard analysis or can be broken down into many hazard analyses.

This page discusses:

See Also
About Higher-Level Effects
In Other Guides
Basic PLM Objects

Failure Modes and Effects Analysis Depending on Domains

Depending on domains, the FMEA names and content vary, such as follows:

Design FMEA

Design Failure Modes and Effects Analyses should be performed and refined at each stage of a design project.

Process FMEA

Process Failure Modes and Effects Analyses should be performed and refined at each stage of a manufacturing process planning.

Principle

The principle below corresponds to a Design FMEA on a logical system.

The first step of an FMEA is to identify the system to be analyzed.

In the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, a design is modeled using logical components.

The logical components are organized in a hierarchy. The FMEA of a logical component identifies the failure modes of each function implemented by the logical component and its causes, which are the failure modes of its subcomponents.

To enable FMEAs to support more than one level of logical decomposition, the causes can be failure modes of functions implemented by logical components from a lower level in the context of their parent.

Failure modes of functions implemented by the function can be selected as higher-level effects. This enables connecting an FMEA to a Preliminary Risk Assessment (PRA) with the Preliminary Risk Assessment app.

A logical component needs to be considered with its context of the whole system. This occurrence has attributes that are features of this unique logical component.

Failures

This section provides more information about failures.

Definitions

There are three different aspects of failures analyzed in an FMEA:

  • A Failure Effect: is defined as the consequences of a failure mode to know what happened.
  • A Failure Mode: is defined as the manner in which a product could fail to meet the intended function.
  • A Failure Cause: is an indication of why the failure mode could occur.

Hierarchical FMEAs

In Failure Modes & Effects Analysis, FMEAs can be performed hierarchically. It means that you can define an FMEA at the level of a system after defining FMEAs at the level of its subsystems, or conversely.

Depending on the level of the study: system, or subsystem, a failure can be a failure effect, failure mode, or failure cause. Relations exist between these failures:



Failure Name
Failure effect
Failure mode
Failure cause

Symptoms

It is possible to work with failure modes, which are not linked with architecture elements. This is the case working with testability, where failure modes correspond to symptoms.