Some 15 years ago I discovered FMEA, while working at a major Consumer Electronics Company. At that time I considered, as many of my colleague designers, FMEA to be a bureaucratic method: "Get the sheet completed and let's get to usual business asap". Apparently we preferred to waste our time doing things twice or even more, in stead of trying to it right from the first time. "Doing things right from the first time", was considered as Pep-talk from our managers who had spend to much time in Japan. Also when it really came to urgencies, the management pushed us to forget about Quality and get the products ready to be shipped. Time seemed to be more important than quality.

Several years later I moved to an industrial research centre that had many small companies as clients. I started reading again about design methods and got interested in tools and methods like Value Analysis, Design for Assembly and Manufacturing, Quality Function Deployment and finally rediscovered my old courses about FMEA. During my consultancy activities for our clients I found out that most of them had heard about FMEA (and most of the other methods), but that were not using them. When we organised a seminar or a short course, then all places in our seminar room were occupied. And yet when we contacted the companies some weeks after they followed our seminar and left with the most ambitious plans to start with FMEA, we heard nothing but excuses, none finally started using FMEA. This was strange because we knew these companies had quality problems, they had service problems, there products were to expensive and there product development was improvisation all over.

What was wrong? We didn't know. A complaint often heard was the lack of time, so we decided to develop a software for our clients to support them to perform FMEA in a more rapid way. We spend thousands of dollars for, you guess it, a useless software. The problem was something else, what it is I still don't know. I guess it's the lack of spirit.

About I year ago I started a discussion about this problem with two of my friends and we decided to start analysing this problem to see if we could solve it, or at least find the underlying reasons for this failure.

We can not accept that methods like FMEA, DFA, QFD, ... with a proven track record of success are not more used by companies that definitely could benefit from it. If in the run of our quest we could find a solution or a business opportunity then of course we will try to exploit it (by writing a book), but making money was not and still is not our main reason for doing this job. Any how we will share all information on this site, so let's hope that some other guys take the lead and join our mission. Our main reason is probably a kind of intellectual hunger and maybe in the end we like to get famous, who knows.

FMEA has all ingredients to be succesful: it's easy (at least it doesn't involve much high tech knowledge), it doesn't require investments, you get results almost immediately and it can be applied to all kind of activities and in all sectors, even in your day to day life. Okay, we took the most easy one ;-), but if we succeed we will do a similar effort for engineering tools in general (DFA, DFM, QFD, VA, ...).

Now you see the first steps of our journey: we have started a small web-site (we are not really computer freaks, so forgive us the simplicity of the site).We will elaborate it to a dedicated FMEA-information Centre in the next months. As a first action we have started a WWW-survey to get more data about people using/not using FMEA, and to make our initiative known to the out-side world. All the information we obtain from this survey will be made available on our site. As we are fully aware that we can not do this job alone we need help, your help as an FMEA addict. We need to increase the size of our team, and given the power of internet this should not be a problem ;-). So please let us know what you find about this initiative, and even if you think we're nuts, we'll appreciate your opinion, because freedom of speech is our other motto.

We will run this site for six months, maybe a year, in the meantime we hope to obtain enough critical mass to transfer our, by then mature, child to a non-commercial organisation or research institute that can put more time in this effort than we can. In case your organisation is candidate to do this job, please do contact us right now.

The FMEA-team, contact us on fmea@compaqnet.be

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