A Structured Approach for Synchronising the Applications of Failure Mode and Effects Analysis

Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) is a systematic approach for evaluating the potential failure modes in a system, and is mainly employed in three distinct tasks labelled: (1) Functional FMEA – evaluating those failures associated with product functional definition, (2) Design FMEA – analysing those failures associated with design definition and (3) Process FMEA – assessing potential failures in manufacturing and assembly processes. The lit-erature review has shown limited works on the field of synchronising these different tasks into a working model. To address this gap, this research developed a framework for integrating these tasks of FMEAs, and then qualita-tively validating the proposed framework. This research adopted a semi-structured questionnaire to collect ex-perts’ feedback and validate the proposed framework. The t-test was then employed to evaluate the collected feedback. The findings highlight that the proposed framework is applicable and could facilitate the synchronisa-tion of the different tasks of FMEA. This research presents a methodological approach for executing and synchro-nising FMEAs. Therefore, the proposed framework is practically relevant as an aid for the practitioners in catching the cascading failures and reducing the relevant impact