A new FMEA approach based on availability and costs

The paper reports on a new FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis) technique for the evaluation of operating failures on machine tools. The traditional FMEA methodology focuses the analysis on failure problems and usually does not take into account other parameters, such as availability and costs. This new technique was setup for predicting operating failures during the design process of machine tools, so reducing costs and time to market. This approach is based on a new index depending on machine tool availability and customer costs related to failure time. For the validation and the evaluation of the method, an industrial case was studied; data collected from this analysis proved to be in good agreement with failures detected by the customer. The adopted method showed a higher reliability compared with traditional FMEA results.