A cost-based FMEA decision tool for product quality design and management

Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) method has been a popular tool by the design and quality/reliability engineering profession for product design and quality/reliability improvement. Fundamentally, through the prioritized improvement targets suggested by FMEA, designers and engineers can improve the overall quality and reliability of either products or processes. The priority is based on a ranked compound score named Risk Priority Number (RPN) which is the product of three factors: occurrence, severity, and detection. However, one of the main disadvantages for FMEA is the fuzziness of assigning a value (zero to ten) toward the three factors which could be considered as subjective decision and the value may vary from person to person. In this article, we proposed the adoption of quality cost factors that are used to replace the ambiguous factors used in the traditional FMEA calculation. In addition, a Graphical-User-Interface (GUI) has been developed which can present the FMEA outcome in a cause-effect relationship figure rather than the traditional FMEA table-form format.