A Method to Reuse Process Failure Modes and Effects Analysis

Manufacturing is a dynamic activity faced with challenges from external and internal environment. These challenges have to be addressed to meet customers' needs such as high product quality, on time delivery and minimum cost. High product quality internally requires capable manufacturing process that exhibit less variation. This in turn requires likely failure modes that are not inherent to the process to be removed out.For a practical purpose, the likely process failure modes can be considered as finite and recurring. Using process failure modes and effects analysis (process FMEA), they can be predicted. During process planning stage, it is customary to associate machining operations with product characteristics such as manufacturing features. Doing so has the potential to reveal shared process characteristics among the manufacturing features and likely process failure modes affecting them. Such association, however, may not be easy particularly when the product variety increases. This problem is a big hindrance for FMEA implementation.This book describes a method to identify and reuse failure modes that affect many products at early process planning stage. It exclusively presents a new approach to process FMEA based on group technology (GT) concept-similar problem needs similar solution. To fully utilize the concept, process FMEA was first conducted for machining and process features, and then for manufacturing part families. The machining and process features FMEA indicates shared failure modes for manufacturing features. The manufacturing part family FMEA on the other hand shows products that share similar failure modes, and it serves as a platform to reuse existing process FMEA knowledge with less time and effort.