A failure mode avoidance approach to reliability

Abstract

Failure modes are an inevitable consequence of the Product Development (PD) process. They are crucial in their impact on product design since they affect product quality and costs because of the requirement for counter measures, thus potentially imposing high risks on any organization engaged in pro duct development in terms of customer dissatisfaction, financial losses, potential safety litigation, loss of brand reputation etc. Failure Mode Avoidance is a pragmatic methodology to deal with failure modes through counter measures development in the early (that is, information based) phases of the PD process prior to any hardware existing, rather than waiting until the failure modes are naturally observed in the material state later in the process during the production preparation and launch phases, when there is typically an abundance of hardware available to expose the failure modes. This paper focuses to develop an approach to detect and mitigate failure modes systematically in the information based phases of the PD process via a conceptual framework built around Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA). The FMEA is an important methodology to identify failure modes during product development so that failure modes can be avoided through the development of countermeasures and provides a logical structure (“left to right”) to make the transition from failure mode to counter measure. However the FMEA lacks structure from “top to bottom” since the number of failure modes requiring attention at the outset is usually unknown. This lack of structure often leads to excessively large FM EA documentation with much time devoted to brainstorming a set of potential failure modes. The vision of this work is that the creativity of the engineering team can be devoted to developing counter measures for the failure modes rather than identifying them [1]. The purpose of the paper is to discuss the beginnings of a structured approach to identify failure modes in a systematic way (using the concept of taxonomies), so that the size of the FMEA can be managed.