Companies take and must be able to take risks on a daily basis. But we often learn the concepts of human risks, economic risks, and technical risks without control, because they were not identified early on in the production process. The consequences are sometimes catastrophic or more generally "simply" expensive. In addition, at the dawn of considerable evolutions in the field of the environmental management, risks management takes on a new dimension. In an industrial company, one undergoes too often:
• costs of external failures generated by the unreliability of products put on the market,
• costs of internal failures due to an abundance of product and procedure modifications, as well as with repair and/or recovery interventions.
Service based companies are even more fragile when faced with unplanned events.
Indeed, from the production to consumption of the service, there is only seldom the means and especially time to seek solutions. It is thus at the preventive stage that it is necessary to intervene.
The FMECA study thus intervenes at a preventive stage and consists of inductive reasoning: starting from the causes, one seeks to determine all the possible effects. It is at the same time a step of improvement and quality assurance which is highly used in industry.
The FMECA analysis rests on the determination of the modes of failures, the effects, of the criticality, evaluated starting from the gravity and of the frequency of the failures.