Course Aim

The 20-hour FMEA and FMECA Practitioners Course helps you conduct amazing FMEAs and FMECAs. ‘FMEA’ stands for Failure Mode and Effects Analyses and includes a special type of analysis called Failure Mode, Effects and Criticality Analyses or FMECAs. They are often the most important thing you can do to prevent production issues, manufacturing delays, budget blow outs, and of course … failures.

There are lots of standards, textbooks and other ‘authoritative references’ that outline what document a FMEA needs to produce. A document created using one FMEA standard can usually be transformed into a document that conforms with any other. But this does not mean that engineers, designers, project managers or organization leaders will actually get something that BENEFITS them. This course teaches its students how to not only adhere to standards (so we can tick ‘that box’) but actually run FMEAs that people walk away from feeling rewarded and excited.

Students who design, manufacture, or are otherwise responsible for preventing failures in a physical system will learn how to use FMEAs to prevent and eliminate problems (like failures) as early as possible. A FMEA is a 4-8 person cross-functional group activity with a collaborative environment to turn their collective corporate knowledge and expertise into a list of prioritized corrective actions that designers, manufacturers or maintainers can implement. FMECAs tend to be FMEAs that also contain detailed breakdowns of component failure rates to help (for example) predict spare parts consumption. For this to work … we need to break our FMECA down into something that first helps us prevent failures, and then transforms into the more detailed analysis that drives support decisions. This course teaches you how to do this!

FMEAs are all about understanding failures before waiting for them to occur. This means we focus on the ‘vital few’ ways our product, system, service or process can fail. This also means we only need to worry about the ‘vital few’ things that quickly and cheaply increase reliability.

This course will motivate you to want to execute good FMEAs (and FMECAs), teach students the fundamentals, and practice students in executing them using a worked example.

Course Outline

Why FMEAs: Introduction | 10 reasons to do FMEAs | Why Things Fail | Fixing (not admiring) problems

Structuring your amazing FMEAs: Complying with ‘standards’ | Supportability | Prioritizing your customer and user | Prioritizing Failure

Making your FMEA work for you: Prioritizing your support system (Criticality Analysis) | How we do maintenance (… with a focus on Reliability Centred Maintenance or RCM) | FMEA Strategies | Scale Workshop

Executing your amazing FMEAs: Preparing for FMEAs | Following up after FMEA | FMEAS in your organization | Review and exercise overview

FMEA/FMECA exercise: Group exercise where we collectively complete an example FMECA

Course Material

The following resources will be provided to attendees of this course:

1. Editable PDF course workbook

2. An example FMEA/FMECA template (Microsoft Excel)