Inertia FMEA

Asleep or in motion? FMEA Inertia and Newton’s 1st Law


According to Newton’s first law of motion, sometimes referred to as the law of inertia, an object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an external force. It’s not too much of a stretch to apply […]

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3d modeling

Rating Catalogue the Right Way


Have you spent hours debating how to properly rate the failures in your Design FMEAs only to realize that the calculated Risk Priority Numbers (RPN) are suggesting you address issues that you know aren’t the ones you should be working on? I thought so… One of the most fundamentally important aspects of the FMEA is […]

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Mazes, Methodology and FMEAs


What’s your strategy for getting through a maze? What if, when you chose a path, you could know ahead of time that it wasn’t a dead end and that you’d get your cheese? What if you could know, at every decision point, that each move was the right move? Is that cheating? Well, maybe, if […]

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Using FMEA to Its Full Potential


About 12 years ago, while earning my 6Sigma Master Black Belt certification, I was in the midst of training hundreds of Green & Black Belt students how to apply the continuous improvement methodology at their place of work.  Their belt certification required that they engage in training marathons and persevere through the completion of approved […]

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5 Steps to Creating a Strong FMEA


The IQ-Software instantiates the foundation for building our FMEAs, according to five basic steps as defined in the instructions of the VDA 96, Volume 4.2.  Following these steps gives your FMEA the structure required to ensure a thorough analysis with no opportunity for confusing failure modes for causes or effects.  Furthermore, the 5-Step process gives […]

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Value-Added FMEA


In one of my previous entries, “Strength of FMEA Process in the Analysis,” I emphasized the significance and benefits of both perceiving and creating the FMEA as an analysis worthy of our time and energy. This only happens when the analysis delivers value. Where’s the Value? “Value may also be expressed as a straightforward relationship between perceived benefits […]

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FMEA Function

Writing “Good” Functions in DFMEAs


In my recent blog,”Model-Based FMEA”, I wrote about the functional model serving as the basis of the Design FMEA in the IQ-Software.  The basic premise is that we will fully know the failures when we understand the function; only when we deviate from the function (in a significant way), do we achieve “failure.”  Through this […]

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Model-Based FMEA


We make models of everything; cars, houses, airplanes, car parts.  For decades, engineers and designers relied on physical models to visualize how their design would appear in finished form.  “Bringing it to life,” as it were.  You may have seen old photographs of car models sculpted out of clay.  You could see how all the […]

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Three Areas of Failure in the FMEA Process


The thing about failures is they are chameleons that can exist by other aliases – Effect, Mode, or Cause.  Every last one of them are failures; functional performance that has drifted far enough from the ideal function to reach the zone of failure.  They achieve their aliases as they fall into different places in what I […]

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Strength of FMEA Process in the Analysis


Do you keep coming across that one word or phrase that, whenever you hear it misused or mispronounced, makes you shake your head or roll your eyes because it’s just plain wrong? Over the past few years, I’ve been miffed by the seemingly sudden misuse of the word “versus” (or vs.) by the young kids in […]

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