	Related Topics:
	Background: FMEA and Related Analyses

FMEAs

Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) and Failure Modes, Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) are methodologies designed to identify potential failure modes for a product or process, to assess the risk associated with those failure modes, to rank the issues in terms of importance and to identify and carry out corrective actions to address the most serious concerns. For an overview of the principles and applications of FMEA and related analyses, see Background: FMEA and Related Analyses.

To add an FMEA to a project, select an item in the System panel and choose Insert > FMEA > Add FMEA.

The FMEA analysis tab will open in the Analysis panel. In addition, the FMEA icon will appear in the corresponding column in the System Hierarchy tab of the System panel (if that column has been selected for display on your computer). To hide or display columns, right-click the column headers in the System panel, then click Customize Columns to select which columns you want to display. These settings are stored per computer/username in the System Hierarchy page of the Application Setup, so any project that you open on this computer will have the same columns displayed.

This chapter describes how to:

Choose which hierarchical structure will fit your analysis process (Effects Before Causes, Grouped Effects Before Causes or Causes Before Effects).
Define the header information that will be displayed at the top of report output.
Use three different views to view or edit the analysis information: Hierarchy, Worksheet or Filtered View.
Add, edit or delete FMEA records (Functions, Failures, Effects and Causes). Note that if you have enabled Controls and Actions records (via the interface style for the project), they can be added directly from the FMEA hierarchy or worksheet views but the records will be treated as "Synthesis resources." This means that the exact same record can be used in more than one location within the project. If the record gets updated in one location, the change will automatically be reflected in all other locations.

Tip: The RCM Analysis chapter includes a discussion of how to use the FMEA hierarchy to record the functional failure analysis for reliability centered maintenance (RCM). This chapter also explains how to define and manage Tasks records.

Tip: The Failure Modes and Reliability Analysis (FMRA) topic describes how to define the reliability/maintenance characteristics for the functions, failures and/or causes that have been defined for any item in the system hierarchy. These characteristics will be applicable if you wish to perform criticality analysis, use the FMEA occurrence ratings to calculate a preliminary baseline estimate of the system reliability, share system configuration/reliability data between RCM++ and BlockSim or perform RCM cost/availability calculations.