International Journal of Emerging
Technology & Research
Volume 1, Issue 6, Sept - Oct, 2014 (www.ijetr.org)
Cost Oriented FMEA In A Mattress Industry
Meril Baby1, Subin George Mathew2
1
M Tech Student, Dept. of Mechanical Engg, Mangalam College of Engineering, Kottayam, Kerala , India
2
Assistant Professor, Dept. of Mechanical Engg, Mangalam College of Engineering, Kottayam, Kerala , India
Abstract— Quality is the degree of excellence, a
product or service provides. A dip in quality of products
affects sales and profitability of the organisation as well
as increases the cost of production due to scrap and
rework. This paper shows an application of cost oriented
Failure mode and Effects Analysis in a mattress industry
to identify the failures occurring during the production
process. This helps in analysing and prioritising each
failure during production process based on internal and
external cost. Cost oriented FMEA was conducted and
failures were prioritised based on cost which is
considered as a measure of severity of failure. This offers
better results for improvement actions than conventional
FMEA as this also take into account the cost associated
with each failures.
Keywords: Cost oriented FMEA, Quality
management, severity, failure cost.
1. INTRODUCTION
FMEA is a systematic method of identifying and
preventing system, product and process problems before
they occur. It is focused on preventing problems, enhancing
safety, and increasing customer satisfaction. Ideally, FMEA
proves to be one of the most important early preventative
actions in system, design, process, or service which will
prevent failures and errors from occurring and reaching the
customer. Failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) is an
engineering technique used to define, identify and eliminate
known and/or potential failures, problems, and errors from
the system, design, process, and/or service before they reach
the customer It is a procedure that examines each item in a
system, considers how that item can fail and then
determines how that failure will affect the process. FMEA’s
are conducted in the product design or process development
stages, although conducting an FMEA on existing products
or processes may also yield benefits.
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ISSN (E): 2347-5900 ISSN (P): 2347-6079
A failure mode is defined as the manner in which a
component, subsystem, system, process, etc. could
potentially fail to meet the design intent. A failure mode in
one component can serve as the cause of a failure mode in
another component. A failure cause is defined as a design
weakness that may result in a failure. A failure mode is
defined as the manner in which a component, subsystem,
system, process, etc. could potentially fail to meet the
design intent. A failure mode in one component can serve as
the cause of a failure mode in another component. A failure
cause is defined as a design weakness that may result in a
failure.
Failure costs are barely considered while failure and its
causes are being analyzed because quality related issues are
not often related to cost management. Cost of quality is the
sum of prevention cost, appraisal cost, and failure costs.
Failure costs are the costs resulting from products or
services not conforming to requirements or customer/user
needs. Failure costs are divided into internal and external
cost. The cost oriented calculations of quality management
instruments like FMEA are very important as this helps the
company in rectifying the failures based on the cost
associated with each failures.
By implementing the cost-oriented FMEA, quality
management can be improved along with improvement in
the cost management reducing cost occurring due to
failures. In order to decide on improvement actions, costs
arising from faults detected by the customer and costs of
faults detected within the boundaries of the company should
be included in the evaluation of potential failures. The new
approach enables managers and designers to prevent
expensive faults and hence facilitates decisions, which make
better use of resources in optimizing products and processes.
The case study presented in this paper confirms the benefits
of the new approach.
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International Journal of Emerging Technology & Research
Volume 1, Issue 6, Sept - Oct, 2014 (www.ijetr.org) ISSN (E): 2347-5900 ISSN (P): 2347-6079
Although the accuracy on implementing the proposed
methodology should satisfy the precondition that the failure
cost associated with each failures are quantified very
accurately. This enables improved performance of the new
methodology and gives more comprehensive and realistic
evaluation of potential failure causes and effects of process
considered for evaluation.
The remaining part of the paper has been organized into
following sections, the literature review is discussed in
section 2 and methodology is discussed in section 3. The
data analysis and interpretation is given in section 4 and
conclusion in section 5.
2. LITERATURE REVIEW
FMEA was a technique floated in the late 1940s along
with the introduction of military standards and encouraged
in 1960s by aerospace companies. Janakiram and Keats
(1995) found that the FMEA was well-known useful tool in
the design process but it is virtually ignored in most process
quality improvement paradigms. Sheng and Shin (1996)
discussed the implementation of FMEA for both product
design and process control. Stamatis, (2003) in his book
briefed the methodology of Failure Mode and Effects
Analysis and explains FMEA use within a company’ risk
management program to prevent customers from being
subject to unacceptable faults and thus to avoid customer
dissatisfaction. Teoh and Case (2004) found that FMEA was
a quality improvement and risk assessment tool, commonly
used in industry. They reviewed various FMEA research
studies, modeling and reasoning methods that could be used
for generic applications. They suggested that FMEA must
be used in the conceptual design stage so as to minimize the
risks of costly failure. They created a prototype to evaluate
the proposed method with the help of case studies.
Pantazopoulos and Tsinopoulos (2005) found that
FMEA is one potential tool with extended use in reliability
engineering, production field as well as in complicated
assemblies. Cassanelli et al. (2006) applied ordinary FMEA
during the design phase of an electric motor control system
for HVAC vehicle. They planned the corrective actions on
the basis of the sole failure mode, as usual in FMEA, and
experienced that taken actions are inadequate. Besterfield et
al (2007) stressed that failure mode effect analysis is a
technique used for defining, identifying and removing
failures or potential failures, problems etc. from the system,
design, process or services. Segismundo and Miguel (2008)
proposed a systematization of technical risk management
through the use of FMEA to optimize the decision making
process in new product development (NPD).
Yang, Bonsall, and Wang (2008) presented a fuzzy rule-
based Bayesian reasoning approach for prioritizing failures
in FMEA. The technique was specifically developed to deal
with some of the drawbacks concerning the use of
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conventional fuzzy logic methods in FMEA. In their
approach, subjective belief degrees were assigned to the
consequent part of the rules to model the incompleteness
encountered in establishing the knowledge base. A Bayesian
reasoning mechanism was then used to aggregate all
relevant rules for assessing and prioritizing potential failure
modes. Chin et al. (2009) proposed an FMEA using the
group-based evidential reasoning (ER) approach to capture
FMEA team members diversity opinions and prioritize
failure modes under different types of uncertainties such as
incomplete assessment, ignorance and intervals. Chang,
Cheng, and Chang (2010) proposed an approach, which
utilizes the intuitionist fuzzy set ranking technique, for
reprioritization of failures in a system FMECA. Geum, Cho,
and Park (2011) proposed a systematic approach for
identifying and evaluating potential failures using a service-
specific FMEA and grey relational analysis In this paper,
grey relational analysis was applied with a two-phase
structure: one for calculating the risk score of each
dimension: O, S and D, and the other for calculating the
final risk priority. Liu, Liu, Liu, and Mao (2012) applied the
VIKOR method, which was developed for multi-criteria
optimization for complex systems, to find the compromise
priority ranking of failure modes according to the risk
factors in FMEA. In the methodology, linguistic variables,
expressed in trapezoidal or triangular fuzzy numbers, were
used to assess the ratings and weights for the risk factors O,
S and D. The extended VIKOR method was used to
determine risk priorities of the failure modes that have been
identified. Burlikowska (2011) explained about the
possibility of use of Failure mode and effect analysis
methods with continuous quality improvement of
organization. At the present time the enterprises should
integrate quality management and quality control with
customer’s requirements, production process’s requirements
and also quality methods.
The literature review reveals that various techniques to
improve the quality of product or process using FMEA have
been developed but very little studies consider the cost
factor associated with the failures. Studies on combined
process quality improvement and cost management are very
less. The purpose of this study is to implement the FMEA
methodology with cost consideration in a mattress industry.
The paper aims at revealing the advantages of the technique
on improvement of the quality of process by prioritizing
failures in relation to cost associated with the failures.
3. METHODOLOGY
In order to improve the financial performance of the
company quality is a factor which is also of prime
importance. Integrating cost consideration in FMEA offers
better performance of firm by managing both quality and
cost performance. The precondition that should be
considered is the cost estimation associated with failures.
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International Journal of Emerging Technology & Research
Volume 1, Issue 6, Sept - Oct, 2014 (www.ijetr.org) ISSN (E): 2347-5900 ISSN (P): 2347-6079
The failures occurring during different stages of
production are identified. Based on the frequency of
failures, probability of occurrence and probability of
detection of failures are determined. Probability of
occurrence is the probability that the failure will occur.
Probability of detection is the probability of detecting the
failures within the company. A high probability of detecting
a fault before delivery reduces the RPNc. The costs
associated with each failure, which include the internal and
external failure cost, are estimated. Internal cost is cost
associated with the rectification of failure if the failure is
detected within the company. External cost is the cost
associated with failures when failures are detected after the
product has been delivered to the customer and customer
detects the fault and returns the product. FMEA is the
product of three factors severity, occurrence and detection.
Here, severity of a failure is the failure cost associated with
failure and probability of the other two factors is
determined. The cost oriented Risk Priority Number (RPNC)
is estimated using the equation:
RPNC = P(O). {P(‫\ܦ‬O).E[Ce] + P(D\O).E[Ci] }
Where,
RPNC = risk priority number based on cost of detected
internal and external faults;
C e = cost of externally detected faults;
C i = cost of internally detected faults;
P(O) – Probability of occurrence
P(D\O)=conditional probability of detecting a fault before
delivery;
P( ‫\ ܦ‬O)=conditional probability of not detecting a fault
before delivery.
4. DATA ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION
Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) is a design
tool that mitigates risks during the design, process, and
product stages before they occur. Using the FMEA, product
and process failures can be analyzed at the design stage and
action can be taken to prevent the occurrence of these
failures or to enhance the probability of detecting them
before delivery. Although many industries use the current
FMEA technique, it has many limitations and problems.
Risk is measured in terms of Risk Priority Number (RPN)
that is a product of occurrence, severity, and detection
difficulty. Measuring severity and detection difficulty is
very subjective and with no universal scale. RPN is also a
product of ordinal variables, which is not meaningful as a
proper measure. Cost consideration within the working
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procedure of FMEA helps in prioritizing failures more
precisely and genuinely.
FMEA method is based on the following: a team
analysis of potential failure modes in the product design in
question, assessment of the risks of their occurrence and
preparing and implementing preventive measures for
improving the quality of the product design and of the
process. Experience shows that using this method may
reveal up to 70 or even 90 % of potential failure modes.
Typical procedures used in practice are based on American
automobile manufacturers’ methods QS-9000: FMEA or on
an almost identical methodology of the German Association
of the Automotive Industry VDA 4.2. Two forms of FMEA
are distinguished, depending on whether the product design
or the process design are the focus: product design FMEA
(design FMEA) and process FMEA.
The paper deals with the application of cost oriented
FMEA in a rubberized coir mattress industry. Since the
paper is related to failures occurring in a mattress industry
the terms of failures might be a little confusing but the paper
reveals the advantageous of the cost oriented modification
of FMEA method.
The work starts with the identifying various stages of
production process in the company. The failure associated
with the company are studied and grouped into those
failures that are identified within the company and those that
go undetected to the customers. The failures were identified
as poor vucanisation, spray less, length less, quilt mis-stitch,
tape damage, border damage etc. The data of number of
each failure for the current year was collected from the
respective source. The failures occurring during each
process and their respective number of failures were
tabulated. The probability of occurrence was estimated
based on the total number of failures and the number of
mattress inspected. Next the probability of detection of each
of the failure before delivery to the customer was
determined and that of the probability of not detecting the
failure before delivery to the customer.
Next is the cost estimation of failures. Failure cost or
cost of poor quality is defined as the sum of costs incurred
to prevent non conformances from happening and the cost
incurred when non conformance in products and services
occurs. Failure cost is further divided into external and
internal failure cost. The internal cost associated with
failures, when the failures are detected within the company
is estimated. These include scrapping of defective product
waste, time to repair faulty product, material cost, labour
cost associated with rework of product, repackaging cost
etc. The external cost is the cost associated with failures
when failures go undetected within the company to the
customers. The external cost of each failure is estimated.
The external cost include time to deal with the problem,
replacement of defective item, transportation cost to/from
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International Journal of Emerging Technology & Research
Volume 1, Issue 6, Sept - Oct, 2014 (www.ijetr.org) ISSN (E): 2347-5900 ISSN (P): 2347-6079
the factory, profit losses, loss of prospective clients,
deterioration of company’s image etc.
The Risk Priority Number (RPNC) based on the data’s
collected are calculated and the results are tabulated and is
shown below (TABLE I). The results show the cost related
RPN ranks for each of the failure in each process of the
production. Thus, the RPN expresses the entire financial
risk of a failure. Hence, the cost-oriented FMEA leads to
more efficient decisions on improvement activities.
4.2 RANKING OF THE FAILURES
Failure costs are barely considered within the working
procedure of the FMEA. Cost-oriented modifications of
quality management instruments therefore become an
important task. The RPNc expresses the entire financial risk
of a failure. Moreover, the costs associated with
improvement activities can be compared with the estimated
costs of a failure. After finding the cost oriented risk priority
number using the improved methodology of Failure Mode
Effect Analysis (FMEA), the failures are ranked based on
the cost oriented in descending order of cost associated with
the failures (TABLE II). According to the ranking the
failure, poor vulcanization was ranked 1 based on the cost
associated with failures as the main criteria. The
improvement activities for each failure are decided based on
the ranks obtained.

TABLE I : COST ORIENTED FMEA RESULTS

PROCESS FAILURES P(O) P( ‫\ܦ‬O) EXTERNAL P(D\O) INTERNAL RPN

C
COST COST

SHEETING OF Poor 0.8 0.8 27,69,509 0.2 45422 1779753

RUBBERIZED Vulcanisation
COIR
Spray less 0.6 0 0 1 378021 226813

HYDRAULIC Thickness 0.6 0.6 1,75,612 0.4 324566 141116

PRESS variation

Density variation 0.2 0 0 1 30375 6075

TRIMMING Width less 0.4 0 0 1 75745 30298

Length less 0.6 0.5 1,89,591 0.5 111112 90211

Shapeless 0.5 0 0 1 104080 52040

PADDING Less bonding 0.1 0 0 1 4633 463.3

Layer separation 0.1 0 0 1 1527 152.7

QUILTING Quilt panel 0.6 0.7 4,46,531 0.3 173866 218831

damage

Quilt Mis-stitch 0.8 0.6 1,84,536 0.4 46417 103431

CORNER Middle folding 0.6 0.8 8,02,169 0.2 105118 39766

CUTTING
Corner damage 0.4 1 2,31,913 0 0 92766

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International Journal of Emerging Technology & Research
Volume 1, Issue 6, Sept - Oct, 2014 (www.ijetr.org) ISSN (E): 2347-5900 ISSN (P): 2347-6079
BORDER Panel damage 0.5 0 0 1 231092 115546
STITCHING
Border damage 0.7 0.7 2,78,941 0.3 23349 141584

Tape damage 0.6 0.6 1,54,108 0.4 2440 56065

Mis-stitch 0.1 0 0 1 3280 328

Skipping 0.1 0 0 1 9200 920

4.3 RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS

TABLE II: RANKING OF FAILURES BASED RPNC
After conducting the failure mode and effects analysis
the failures occurring during the production process of
FAILURES RPN RANK
C rubberized coir mattress was found out. The failure was
identified and the causes of each failure determined. The
Poor Vulcanisation 1779753 1
cost associated with each failure was estimated. The cost
Spray Less 226813 2 associated with internally occurring failure and costs
associated with failures which are identified after the
Quilting Panel Damage 218831 3 product is delivered to customers are determined. According
to the ranking of failures based on RPNC, poor vulcanization
Border Damage 141584 4 was the major failure causing high cost of rework and
repair. Improvement activities should be to taken reduce the
Thickness Variation 141116 5 failure rates. Failure costs increase the cost of production
thereby reducing the profit of the firm hence cost
Panel Damage 115546 6 consideration during quality management is very important.
The ranking of failures helps to prioritize the failures so that
Quilt Misstitch 103431 7 more importance is given to those failures which cause high
failure cost to the company and affecting the financial
Corner Damage 92766 8 performance of the firm.
Length Less 90211 9 5. CONCLUSION
Tape Damage 56065 10 The major failure occurring internally and externally
during the production process of mattress was found using
Shapeless 52040 11 the method. The failures are prioritized based on the
probability of occurrence and detection as well as the
Middle Folding 39766 12
severity of failures evaluated by estimating failure cost of
each failure. The new methodology was found advantageous
Width Less 30298 13
since it prioritizes failures by considering the cost associated
Density Variation 6075 14 with failures thereby helping the firm to take improvement
action in consideration with cost of failures thereby
Skipping 920 15 providing a better basis for selection of optimization
activities. This method enables a more realistic evaluation of
Less Bonding 463 16 the potential failure modes occurring during a process.

Mis- Stitch 328 17

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Layer Separation 152 18
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International Journal of Emerging Technology & Research
Volume 1, Issue 6, Sept - Oct, 2014 (www.ijetr.org) ISSN (E): 2347-5900 ISSN (P): 2347-6079
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