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Part of the FMEA family
DFMEA vs PFMEA
DFMEA example
PFMEA example
Parting thoughts
June 12 2020
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Whenever
1 (801) you’re trying to create a design process for a new product, you have
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make
sure that every step of the process and every product component can efficiently do what
they are supposed to do. This is where PFMEA and DFMEA can help.
In complex processes and products, finding and improving the weakest links is easier
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said than done. Luckily, techniques like Process FMEA and Design FMEA can help us
find potential problems in theory – so we can minimize (or eliminate) the chance of their
occurrence in practice.
DFMEA and PFMEA are fairly complex technical processes, but we will do our best to
explain when and how they are used. We will finish our step-by-step explanations for
each methodology with a practical example.
FMEA stands for Failure Mode and Effects Analysis, and it represents a step-by-step
approach one can take to identify all possible failures (in a certain design, product,
process, or service) and assess the possible effects of those failures. Ultimately, the
FMEA methodology helps you determine which steps you can take to mitigate some of
the risks that come with any system’s failure.
While the execution is similar, some specifics differentiate how someone approaches
identifying design versus process failures, which is why FMEA is split into different
categories like DFMEA and PFMEA.
DFMEA vs PFMEA
The main difference between these two methods can be realized by just looking at their
names. Design FMEA concentrates on creating reliable products, while Process FMEA
focuses on developing reliable processes.
While they can be used independently, they are often used together as a part of the
Advanced Product Quality Planning (APQP) process. APQP is a five-stage process used
by manufacturers to create a product quality plan for developing and manufacturing
products that meet customer requirements.
For instance, you can use them when you are introducing a new product to the market.
DFMEA ensures you have a quality product. PFMEA helps you establish an efficient and
reliable manufacturing process for that product.
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If you are a manufacturing organization that strives for continuous improvement and
relies on concepts like six sigma and TPM, DFMEA and PFMEA can be used as a
regular add-on for making incremental improvements to existing products and processes.
We realize that this might sound pretty confusing to someone that isn’t that familiar with
the subject matter but don’t worry, we will explain it in detail! Let’s take a deeper dive into
each method to get a better idea of how these techniques are executed in practice.
What is DFMEA?
DFMEA stands for Design Failure Mode and Effects Analysis. Many industries worldwide
adopt it as a qualitative tool that puts their designs under the microscope. It serves to
review designs to identify what might go wrong, in which way would the failure
manifest, and what would be the consequences of those failures.
Key decision-makers then use the information in the product design and product
development phases to improve a product’s quality by making recommended
modifications before execution. However, not all “negatives” of a design will be corrected.
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In some
1 (801) cases, the design flaws are reworked to mitigate the likelihoodFree
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failure,
but not eliminate it.
There are two main instances in which one might decide to perform Design FMEA:
Of course, this is just a recommended team setup. You can go with a different structure.
However, keep in mind that it is important to have diverse expertise on the team that
covers every part of the production process. It is the only way to eliminate potential blind
spots.
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DFMEA
1 (801) template example – Image source
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Each step of DFMEA builds on the subsequent one, always supplying key indicators that
will be used to make crucial decisions.
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The design phase is where the multidisciplinary team goes through every system,
subsystem, interface, and component to determine what could go wrong. Details
are then included in the items, functions, and requirements section of the DFMEA
worksheet.
The aim is to see just how good a design is and whether changes should be made to
make it better.
The design dictates the direction that the project will take and therefore plays a vital role
in decoupling each system/component from the whole. The DFMEA worksheet is
completed in stages closely tied to the project’s design timeline during this decoupling.
This helps to effectively isolate each item so that interactions are revealed, which helps
us identify failure modes more easily.
It’s then possible to consider collective or selective recommended actions at later stages.
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There
1 (801) are five failure modes:
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A component or system may have more than one failure mode, and it’s important to
document each at this stage.
Put simply; failure effects can be loss of life, environmental damage, financial loss,
property destruction, impact on regulatory requirements, as well as public scrutiny.
The degree of severity you can assign is relative: what you might consider to be very
severe might not be severe on another project.
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Expert
1 (801) opinions that are guided by experience help to narrow down the severity
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each
failure mode. To make this easier, DFMEA uses the following scale:
9-10: Very severe consequences where regulatory and safety factors cannot be
overlooked. Often results in a change of the design direction.
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7-8: Loss or degradation of the primary function of the component/system studied.
5-6: Loss or degradation of the secondary function of the component/system
studied.
2-4: Annoyance that doesn’t affect functionality.
Conciseness and completeness are the keywords at this stage. You don’t want to get lost
in long descriptions where it takes a lot of time to understand the causes or mechanisms.
Every cause or mechanism you can think of should be listed, but staying focused with
pertinent ones will ensure you don’t go off track.
The two types of design controls considered in columns 9 and 11 of the DFMEA
worksheet are prevention control and detection control, and they provide valuable
information to guide corrective actions later on:
The aim of each of these is to detect failures before the items go into operation mode.
You are looking into the future and using experience from your team members and
yourself to guide your judgment. With occurrence ranking, we don’t talk about
absolute value. Instead, we talk about a relative deduction supported by experience,
research, brainstorming, and other information-gathering techniques.
Detection ranking assigns a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 means that failure cannot occur,
while 10 stands for almost impossible to detect.
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Now, you might be curious: Do I choose prevention control or detection control for my
project? The answer is that you should always aim to have robust prevention control in a
place where possible. As explained earlier, prevention control eliminates the cause or
mechanism of failure, which has an impact on the occurrence. Detection control identifies
when failure has occurred but does not prevent it.
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The value you get will be between 1 and 1000 (as all 3 factors are ranked on a scale of 1
to 10). The higher the RPN, the higher the risk involved. This is where design
modifications are considered and take us to our next step in determining corrective
actions.
A good starting point is to determine what is an acceptable RPN for your organization.
A low RPN on a particular item does not mean there are no risks. Good design practice
would be to look at the design holistically and see where the RPN can be lowered, even
when it is already low.
Critical components that have high RPN require special care with specific
recommendations. These recommendations can take the form of revising the design to
look for engineering guidelines that may have been missed, starting from scratch with a
new design, or taking additional recommendations into considerations. All these actions
aim to see how to adjust severity, occurrence, and detection.
As a guide, severity should only change if the failure has been removed – which may
involve a complete design change.
To lower the occurrence ranking, you’ll need to go back to the basics where the
causes/mechanisms are listed in column 8 of the DFMEA worksheet. Assess each cause
or mechanism carefully with a focus on removing or using control measures.
To lower detection, you can implement more preventative measures bearing in mind that
these might increase costs.
often
1 (801) won’t go according to plan, and column 17 of the DFMEA worksheet reminds
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that.
You can note the actual finished date so that you can keep track of where you were
before the project execution, as you progress throughout the sheet with design changes.
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At the end of the day, the goal is to have an optimal design with tolerable or no risks.
DFMEA example
After a lot of theory, now it’s time to apply everything with an example. Albert Einstein
also believed that “Example isn’t another way to teach when he said, it is the only way to
teach.”
The example we’ll consider is one we’ve already mentioned in step #3 with the lightning
arrester and lightning protection system (LPS). To keep our example short and
understandable, we’ll only consider items 1 and 3 of the LPS, and we won’t be
recalculating the RPN. We are also not considering whole items, subparts of interfaces.
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We can see from the table above, that the RPN is 800 in all cases. If our predetermined
RPN threshold was 200 for example, then we would have to find ways to reduce our
failure modes by looking at the severity, occurrence, and detection of each item.
What is PFMEA?
PFMEA stands for Process Failure Mode and Effects Analysis. Unlike DFMEA, which
focuses on design, PFMEA focuses on processes. It is a qualitative tool that zooms in
on current processes to see where they can be improved and helps in developing new,
reliable and efficient, processes.
design
production
quality
service
logistics
Each team member should be experienced in his field so they are able to understand
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how851-1218
1 (801) the analyzed process will impact their department and what are the limitations of the
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process from their perspective.
The diagram shows from input to output all the activities associated with each process,
including interfaces. To put it simply, the process map guides the team from the moment
a process starts to the moment it ends by providing a logical manner to assess what
details are involved in its entire journey.
In the PFMEA flowchart, the process function and requirements can be completed at this
stage. But before we move to step 2, let’s see what’s involved in the process function and
requirement:
Process function: Defines the intent of the operation. Put simply, it specifies the
reason/purpose of an action.
Process requirement: In this column, the team defines the What for each process.
This “What” includes all the inputs for each process.
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1 (801) five failure modes mentioned earlier in DFMEA are also applied here. Free Trial
These impacts should be consistent with what was already decided by the team during
the DFMEA brainstorming. They should also be noted separately, even if they are
already mentioned in the DFMEA worksheet.
1. Full failure
2. Partial failure
3. Intermittent failure
4. Degraded failure
5. Unintentional failure
Again, this is a relative scaling based on the experience and knowledge of the
multidisciplinary team. We already mentioned how each number is classified in DFMEA,
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but to
1 (801) refresh your memory, here it is again:
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The classification column helps to prioritize the failure modes that require urgent
attention, special products (material sensitivity in certain environments), and
requirements (legislation).
To achieve this, broad statements that do not provide any specific detail about the “How”
should be avoided. As with the DFMEA worksheet, conciseness and completeness are
two essential parameters that define how each cause/mechanism is best detailed.
Prevention control: During the input and output journey of a process, many weak
links can cause failure to occur. If there are measures to stop, remove, and
eliminate this possibility along a process, we will lower the number of failures and
risks involved.
Detection control: Maybe, during a particular process, it’s not possible to prevent
a failure. If this is not a critical failure, then measures should be in place to detect it.
By recognizing it, you also open the possibility of using prevention controls if
needed.
Some degree of assumption is needed to know if the current process controls are robust
enough. Therefore, you’ll create what-if scenarios. You will imagine that a particular
process has failed to see how the other processes might be affected. Doing so narrows
down the risks involved and helps to identify how different processes are interconnected.
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STEP
1 (801) #7:
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Before calculating the RPN, you need to ask: How frequently will the cause/mechanisms
that lead to failure modes occur on a scale of 1 to 10? This can tricky to estimate. If you
have a similar process you can use as an example, the typical occurrence scale can go
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as follows:
We need to prioritize our findings to decide which is urgent and should be corrected by
appropriate process changes. Naturally, processes with high risks should be at the top of
the priority list.
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STEP
1 (801) # 10:
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With the corrective actions defined, the next step is to have a living document of steps
and actions. We want to remove weak links in our processes, and we need to look at
both our design and our process flow chart. We should ask:
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Who will be responsible for putting the recommended actions in place?
When can we expect these changes to be made?
How will these changes affect the available resources we have for other processes
and design changes?
What are the highest priorities?
After the changes have been implemented, we can calculate RPN to see if we were able
to reduce it.
An RPN recalculation provides information about the effect of each of our actions on the
weakest link. We defined our action plan in step #9 and decided to implement each in
step # 10. Now we want to know the effect our changes had on the process and design
and see if we could address all failure modes with high severity in the best way possible.
Once we know that the changes address all the risks and have identified those risks that
aren’t serious, it’s time to agree with the team and wrap things up.
PFMEA example
We look at our previous example, but this time from a process and not a design point of
view. We consider the processes involved in 1, 2, and 3 to keep our example short and
easy to understand. We won’t consider recalculating the RPN.
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It is worth noting that an RPN below a certain threshold may still need to be adjusted if
the severity is high, and there are no control methods to prevent or detect certain failure
modes. While time-consuming, this holistic approach guarantees optimality in both
design and processes.
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As all people in technical fields know, theory is not worth much if it doesn’t
translate into practice. If your process relies on visual inspections and other
preventive maintenance work, maintenance teams need to follow that up by
creating and following their preventive maintenance schedules. CMMS is here
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to help you coordinate those activities and ensure your PFMEA and DFMEA
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efforts are not wasted.
Parting thoughts
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Despite their many advantages, Design FMEA and Process FMEA will not solve every
failure. If that was the case, maintenance managers and reliability engineers would never
have to concern themselves with failure metrics.
The types of failures identified and associated solutions are closely tied with the
experience and knowledge of the multi-disciplinary team tasked to conduct the process
and their access to historical records. One of the ways to gather historical data is to use
CMMS software like Limble that will always save data about different failures and their
potential causes in the asset logs. If you don’t know what a CMMS is, check out our
What is a CMMS System and How Does it Work guide.
If you can handle a somewhat steep learning curve, DFMEA and PFMEA are invaluable
risk assessment tools that can have a big impact on your bottom line.
We hope that this provided a nice overview of what is required to use these risk
assessment techniques. We could not include every detail of every step, as this article
would be extremely long. For those that are seriously thinking of using DFMEA and
PFMEA, we suggest you look for relevant courses and certifications that provide more
hands-on experience.
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