The management of a company always involves risks relating to the environment. It is confronted with the problems of technical reliability of components, with the human reliability and the evaluation of the consequent risks. FMECA is a method that allows a systematic analysis, composed by component, of all the possible modes of failures and specifying their effects on the total system. The purpose of it is to evaluate the impact, or criticality, the modes of failures of the components of a system on reliability, maintainability, the availability and the safety of this system.
FMECA is applicable to a product, a service, a process, a project. It makes it possible to optimize reliability of it, by detecting the errors at an early stage and by preventing them. One generally distinguishes:
• Produced FMECA: it is turned primarily towards the optimization of reliability, i.e. it defines the preventive actions to consider, but also possible provisions the after-sales one. It thus includes the activities in liaison with the customer. It is centred on the improvement, in design, and performances.
• Proceeded FMECA: it is interested more particularly in a means of production and the sequence of the operations of production. It is turned primarily towards the improvement of the productivity.
It should be noted that a FMECA study permanently associates the factual data resulting from history and the purely estimated and prospective data.
The FMECA analysis is carried out throughout the stages of a project, generally made up of three phases: the phase of study, the phase of development, and the phase of industrialization. Produced FMECA is realizable from the phase of study and continues throughout the two other phases. The analysis is updated progressively advance of the project. Moreover it is desirable that the analysis is then revised in phase of production, then of exploitation of the product, to grow rich by the results of the failures observed.
Proceeded FMECA starts only in the phase of development and applies to all the new processes and process stages considered as criticism.
