Failure mode and effective analysis (FMEA) is a great method of the Lean Six Sigma philosophy. It serves as an effective tool for identifying potential problems and their impact on companies.

Defects are expensive for companies. Customers are disappointed when they have great expectations on a product or service and then discover that the quality just isn’t there. These defects are generally detected though predictive modeling that occurs much later in the development process. This explains why they’re so expensive for companies to deal with. A way to avoid this problem is by avoiding defects altogether. This is where FMEA comes into play.

FMEA is a tool that’s both systematic and qualitative. This tool is generally created with a spreadsheet and allows those using it anticipate what could possibly go wrong with a process or product. This tool is so useful because it helps users find both the possible causes of failures and the potential of failures being detected before they happen, as well as how a process or product might fail.

Finding failure modes is a disciplined process and the first step requires choosing participants with the correct type of experience. If a particular process is being worked on, choosing the process owner or designer should be a given. Be sure the team is varied and also includes suppliers and customers. These different viewpoints will be useful when working the process.

Once a team is chosen, brainstorming begins. All possibilities for failure should be examined and posed as potential cause for defect. No suggestion should be dismissed as being too unlikely. The team must be able to explain the potential causes for failure as well as the effects of it.  After brainstorming, these ideas need to be made more concrete. For each failure mode identified, a risk priority number is assigned based on severity, occurrence, and detection levels. The risk priority number is determined by multiplying these three numbers.

Failure modes are examined and the team must then adjust the FMEA they’ve created to list these failures in order, according to their risk priority number.  Setting priorities can be challenging if there isn’t a solid threshold risk priority number that flags an item as being vital.

Once a Lean Six Sigma team has made their priorities, they must create a list of corrective actions that work towards reducing the occurrence of failure modes. Teams will then meet again routinely, once these corrections have been initiated, to ensure they are effective and long term solutions.