Track 1 Session 2

10:30 to 11:30 a.m. Wednesday April 7, 2010

Supe-RPN – Optimal Prioritizing of Potential Failures Detected by FMEA

You performed a very effective FMEA of a major system, and found 342 Potential Failures (PFs). You cannot treat all of them (budget, economic situation, etc.) you had better not miss any "sneaky" ones (reputation – the company’s and yours). You have a major dilemma that occurs quite often! We would like to share with you our dilemmas, a novel prioritizing tool that we developed, the lessons we learned and how we turned them into an application success.

Our default "prioritizer" was the classic RPN, a product of a potential failure’s Severity, Occurrence and Detectability ranking, on a 1-10 scale. But you and we know that setting cutoff RPN values for classifying potential failures with the standard RPN – often does not "work right." Prioritizing with a Criticality Matrix (CM) classifies potential failures into treatment regions reasonably well. But the CM uses only the potential failure’s Severity and Occurrence, and its regions are sometimes difficult to define. We developed and successfully applied an enhanced RPN methodology, that we named Supe-RPN. The Supe-RPN enabled us to prioritize potential failures such that all project teams adopted it enthusiastically. An optimized version of the Supe-RPN is also presented.

Key Words: FMEA Framework, Risk Priority Number (RPN), Prioritizing Potential Failures, Supe-RPN

Alon M. Sneor

RAMST Consulting

Israel