FmEaInfoCentre.com
Title
FMEA Info Centre Home Page Failure Mode and Effects Analysis Information Center
Description
Our Mission:
To promote the use of FMEA as a most powerful engineering tool, with capabilities that go far beyond pure quality improvements
How the idea came to life:
Around 1985 ago I discovered FMEA, while working at a major Consumer Electronics Company. At that time I considered, as many of my colleague designers, FMEA to be a bureaucratic method: "Get the sheet completed and let's get to usual business asap". Apparently we preferred to waste our time doing things twice or even more, in stead of trying to it right from the first time. "Doing things right from the first time", was considered as Pep-talk from our managers who had spend to much time in Japan. Also when it really came to urgencies, the management pushed us to forget about Quality and get the products ready to be shipped. Time seemed to be more important than quality.
Several years later I moved to an industrial research centre that had many small companies as clients. I started reading again about design methods and got interested in tools and methods like Value Analysis, Design for Assembly and Manufacturing, Quality Function Deployment and finally rediscovered my old courses about FMEA. During my consultancy activities for our clients I found out that most of them had heard about FMEA (and most of the other methods), but that they were not using them. When we organized a seminar or a short course, then all places in our seminar room were occupied. And yet when we contacted the companies some weeks after they followed our seminar and left with the most ambitious plans to start with FMEA, we heard nothing but excuses, none finally started using FMEA. This was strange because we knew these companies had quality problems, they had service problems, their products were to expensive and their product development was improvisation all over.
Languages
English
