Knowledge-Enabled Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA)

  

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FMEA is a best-practice methodology for analyzing potential reliability problems early in the product or process development cycle when they are easier to correct.  It’s used in product development, systems engineering, reliability engineering, and operations management to help teams identify possible failure modes based on past experience or to design products and processes so as to remove potential weaknesses.

Two of FMEA’s most daunting challenges are:

1. Making smart, objective decisions about where to place limited resources for testing and failure mitigation efforts
2. Leveraging ‘corporate memory’ and worldwide external knowledge to augment the expertise of FMEA team members

To help manufacturers tap and apply internal past experience as well as external knowledge and expertise, IHS Goldfire leverages common sources of technical experience across the product lifecycle  - including  warranty and field service reports, standards, consumer and quality audit surveys, trade studies and tear-down reports, patents, an array of third-party industry and technical content and more  - by semantically processing each sentence to understand, and then aggregate, related causes and effects into paired groups that are then stored in a Cause-Effect Experience Base.

This Cause-Effect Experience Base provides users with an objective view of the categories of causes (and effects) across millions of events.  IHS Goldfire provides a bi-directional view of the Experience Base – given a Failure Mode, users can see both its causes and its effects. If desired, users can view the context of a cause-effect pair by clicking to retrieve source documents with the references highlighted.

By aggregating cause and effect experience from unlimited sources of digital content – across languages, geographies, industries and domains, IHS Goldfire acts as a virtual subject matter expert to accelerate problem resolution with comprehensive, cross-domain insights.

Rapid, precise delivery of concepts that are relevant answers to FMEAs’ most difficult questions facilitates reuse of corporate intellectual assets and extends the scope of insights well beyond current disciplines and industries, all while reducing reliance on critical subject matter experts.

Download the ‘Knowledge-Enabled FMEA’ white paper to find out how software like IHS Goldfire can help your organization exploit past knowledge and expertise to enable smarter FMEA.