Implementation of Failure Mode and Effect Analysis: A Literature Review

FMEA was formally introduced in the late 1940s for military usage by the US Armed Forces. Later, it was used for aerospace/rocket development to avoid errors in small sample sizes of costly rocket technology. FMEA enables the team to design those failures out of the system with the minimum of effort and resource expenditure, thereby reducing development time and costs. It is widely used in manufacturing industries in various phases of the product life cycle and is now increasingly finding use in the service industry. Although, initially developed by the military, FMEA methodology is now extensively used in a variety of industries including semiconductor processing, food service, plastics, software, and healthcare. Various approaches and applications of FMEA have been developed so far. This paper provides a survey and brief summary of the work on the FMEA from 1977 to 2011.