Where's Your FMEA Treasure Buried?

So, if you’re like me when you were a kid the idea of a treasure map taking you to find a buried treasure on some deserted island somewhere like Blackbeard was an unimaginable adventure to have run through your imagination.? Somehow as I gravitated through the ranks of various quality engineering and management roles, I admittedly felt like I had a patch over one eye and a peg leg after some customer and supplier engagements.? Not exactly the battle on the high seas headed for the treasure I had imagined but nonetheless an adventure of a different sort.

What if I told you that you had a map to a buried treasure and all you were lacking was the decoder ring?? Would you be interested?

If your organization has been around for a few decades and you have been building FMEAs every year since then there is an excellent chance that you are sitting on some valuable data (treasure) and haven’t taken the time to evaluate its worth.? Like most organizations there have been numerous talented engineers who have come through your doors over the years and built out your FMEAs for various platforms and components along the way.? Each of these FMEAs contain both common and unique data elements for many items you have made.? Cause and effect failure analysis that will also contain action items and improvement areas.? I’ll spare you any more details of what’s contained in an FMEA since I assume you understand its contents and capabilities.? Typically, these are filed away or maybe if you are lucky repurposed (copy/paste) into a new FMEA for a similar type of product.? Have you ever thought of all the information your company has forgotten over the years?

Back to the treasure map…

One of the marvels of modern technology is its ability to unravel the mysteries of the past in many areas.? In this respect let us take all those old FMEAs, import them into a database application and give them new life.? We have the ability to take old excel FMEAs and import them.? Once these documents are imported into a database and sorted properly, they will populate various fields in a database that are common across them all.? These common elements are now searchable.? Given the modern query capabilities of applications like ours we can search and sort data elements across an entire database for specific functions, failures, causes and action items just to name a few.? Once the data is summarized, we can then choose to migrate one of these hybrids over to foundation FMEA in our template system where all these historical lessons learned can be put into practice for future program use.? This is where the buried treasure lies, through unlocking years of engineering content and putting it into modern practice.

Why are you still sitting on all that old data?? Ok you have a retention records policy but besides that….