A New Approach to FMEA
FMEA (failure mode effect analysis) is a systematic approach to understanding how potential failure modes and their risks could affect the business. This method has been in operation for a number of years by multiple industries. The FMEA approach is a method which can be implemented to help sites to understand which areas of the plant need to be given the greatest attention during normal operations.
The current FMEA approach has a number of benefits for a site; it also has a number of disadvantages. Some of the disadvantages are:
- It requires a large number hours to be completed.
- It tends to be a project completed once and not reviewed on a continuous basis, whereas it would need to be reviewed at least once a year.
- It is not a live updating package.
- It requires staff with extensive experience of the plant.
- It is a slow process if trying to review large volume of historical data.
These are some of the FMEA's constraints. As a result of the limitation, Meastim have developed a new approach for addressing some of these short coming. We have developed a process whereby we collect all the production and maintenance data into the web-based package against the asset register structure. Each function/line location has its downtime ranked by time and criticality, based on its historical information. Having this data available allows for the study of the FMEA to be a much faster and much more accurate process. Once the FMEA process has been completed, the ongoing updating is an automatic process based around evaluating live downtime from the site. The planned maintenance tasks developed from the site are developed from the study and automatically loaded into either Meastim's planned maintenance system or the site's existing planned maintenance system. These will also be updated along side the updated FMEA throughout the year.