All too often FMEA (Failure Modes and Effects Analysis), DFMEA (Design, Failure Modes, and Effects Analysis) or FMECA (Failure Mode, Effects, and Criticality Analysis) ends up costing a company hundreds or thousands of dollars to prepare and returns nothing by way of payback, increased reliability or improvement. Following are four reasons this usually happens and how you can make your FMEA efforts reap huge savings:

1. FMEA is treated as a job for a reliability engineer, who completes it and files it in the deliverables folder of ISO 9001 or the Six Sigma design for reliability deliverables folder. Engineers didn’t create it, thus they don’t study it and make the improvements indicated.
2. Design engineers see it as just another task to be done before they can get their design approved. They do it—usually late—but they get it turned in. It’s filed in the deliverables folder. No improvements are made.

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