Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) was developed in the late 1940’s by the U.S. military as a means of determining the effect of system and equipment failures. In the 1960’s, NASA refined the FMEA as a means to improve reliability of space hardware. FMEA was introduced into healthcare in the 1990’s. When properly completed, a FMEA identifies and mitigates potential risks. Continue reading
In 2000, I wrote Risk Management: Is It the Future of Quality Management? for ASQ’s Quality Progress. We’ve been evangelizing this concept a long time.
Why do I bring this up?
We’ve been evangelizing the mantra for 15 years. We felt so strongly that we have a have a registered trademark on the Future of Quality: Risk® Continue reading
It has been suggested that Stone Age man had a higher IQ than today’s modern homo sapiens. “That cannot be” says the modern man but, if one thinks about such an assault on our modern-day ego and self-confessed superiority, the alleged ‘primitive’ man was able to survive in extreme conditions, travelled the planet and set the foundations for today’s societies. Continue reading
What is a FMEA? The acronym stands for Failure Modes and Effects Analysis. This is quite a mouthful, but it takes a systematic engineering approach and looks for how “it” can “fail” instead of how “it” can succeed. Continue reading
An essential element of any successful reliability program is the notion that all reliability activity relates to decisions. If you are performing a highly accelerated life test (HALT) only because it is listed on the product development guidelines or because it was carried over from the last program’s plan, and the HALT results are not part of the design improvement decision-making process, then you probably should not be doing so. Continue reading