This step-by-step guide provides essential guidance for conducting your first design failure mode and effects analysis (DFMEA), including common mistakes to avoid.
This subset of failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) has gained significant traction in corporate settings in recent years as it allows engineers to spot design problems before you spend thousands of dollars on the wrong materials and equipment.
Key takeaways
- Engineers use a design failure mode and effects analysis as a proactive method during the design phase to identify and mitigate potential product failures before they reach production, helping you avoid costly rework and downtime.
- The process requires a cross-functional team to review the design, identify all potential failure modes, assess their effects, and calculate a risk priority number to prioritize corrective actions.
- Key benefits of performing a design failure mode and effects analysis include lower production costs, higher customer satisfaction, and more effective risk management by systematically addressing design flaws early.
- Common mistakes to avoid are performing the analysis too late, using an incomplete team, and failing to integrate design failure mode and effects analysis with other quality processes like process failure mode and effects analysis.
What does DFMEA stand for?
DFMEA stands for design failure mode and effect analysis. This analytical framework helps engineers identify and prevent costly product development issues before they impact production.
Think of it as catching design flaws while they're still sketches on a whiteboard. Designing with efficiency in mind helps your organization increase productivity, uptime, and throughput by allowing assets to function more effectively and produce fewer defects.
What is the purpose of design failure mode and effects analysis?
DFMEA serves as an essential risk analysis tool for maintenance and operations teams in asset-intensive industries. The main goal is to stop design flaws from turning into equipment breakdowns.
Key applications for maintenance professionals include:
- Manufacturing facilities: For example, preventing conveyor system design flaws that cause unplanned downtime
- Food and beverage plants: Such as identifying potential sanitation issues in equipment design
- Oil and gas operations: Like assessing pump and valve designs for safety compliance
- Logistics centers: For example, evaluating automated sorting equipment before installation
The process helps companies avoid costly design defects that lead to equipment failures, production delays, and safety incidents.
How does design failure mode and effects analysis work?
A DFMEA is an investigation into every way your design could fail using the central question, what's stopping this product from working as intended? It focuses on four areas of analysis:
- Failure mode: The ways that a design-related failure occurs. For example, a packaging machine conveyor belt slips when operating above 85°F for more than four hours continuously.
- Failure cause: The root cause of the failure mode stems from a defect in a device's design, system, quality, or part application.
- Failure effect: The immediate consequences of the failure. For example, a misaligned belt can cause defective products.
- Severity of failure: The severity of failure impacts productivity, quality, and safety. Quality engineers typically consider worst-case outcomes.
In essence, DFMEA helps determine what might go wrong, how harmful the consequences would be, and how to mitigate the failure modes before they occur.
DFMEA has helped many industries such as manufacturing, software development, healthcare, and food production take a proactive risk prevention and reduction approach.
Difference between design failure mode and effects analysis and failure mode and effects analysis
Failure mode and effects analysis is simply a broad form of DFMEA. Essentially, it's the same risk assessment tool applied to a broader scope of operations.
Cross-functional teams use FMEA to identify potential failures in product design, production processes, and equipment function. Teams use FMEA across everything from production processes to equipment maintenance—not just design issues. That's why conducting a DFMEA is often a shorter process and requires fewer resources than a full FMEA analysis.
Organizations perform design failure mode and effects analysis in the following scenarios:
- Before launching a new product, process, or service
- Before deploying existing strategies or products in new capacities
- When implementing new standard operating procedures (SOPs)
- While making improvements to existing processes, products, and services
- When customers routinely complain about a deliverable
FMEA aims to minimize major failures in products, processes, and services. Both frameworks look to identify possible failures, determine the severity of the consequences of failure, and recommend improvements to mitigate that risk.
Both DFMEA and FMEA focus on reducing operational costs, whereas an FMEA aims to lower equipment maintenance-related expenses.
Benefits of design failure mode and effects analysis
Here's what a DFMEA delivers for your operation:
- Effective risk management: Every design has blind spots—the more complex your equipment, the more things can go wrong. The more mechanically complex the deliverable, the more likely its production processes will contain inefficiencies. DFMEA makes it easier to identify potential problems that would otherwise go undetected until trial production phases.
- High customer satisfaction ratings: Design problems, no matter how small, seriously inconvenience customers. Identifying potential failure modes during the design stage with DFMEA provides a safety net to catch the kind of flaws that upset the people who buy your products. Companies that provide seamless customer experiences build more loyal followings than those that don't. This leads to increased brand recognition, longevity, and profitability.
- Lower production costs: Companies often recall problematic products. Not only does this increase production costs, but it results in delayed product launches. DFMEA helps prevent such issues by supporting the creation of realistic solutions.
- Prioritize action items: DFMEA isn't only effective in identifying potential design failures, but it's also effective in prioritizing mitigation actions. The framework ranks different failure modes based on severity, occurrence, and ability to detect the failures.
How to perform a design failure mode and effects analysis
Because a DFMEA involves many variables and several team members, things get complicated without proper systems in place. The following step-by-step process will help you avoid these pitfalls and keep things organized:
Step 1: Assemble your team and review the design
Assemble a cross-functional team that includes representatives from key operational areas:
- Engineering managers: Provide technical design oversight
- Maintenance supervisors: Share field experience with similar equipment
- Production leads: Understand operational requirements and constraints
- Quality engineers: Ensure compliance and testing protocols
Your team should evaluate all systems, subsystems, and components to identify potential failure modes. Focus on critical equipment that directly impacts production capacity and safety.
Step 2: Identify all failure modes
Thoroughly assess each item and identify all potential failure modes, including:
- Full failures: This type of failure mode shuts down the system or its components. The system cannot function until the faulty part is entirely replaced.
- Partial failures: While the system or product is still functional, the failure mode prevents it from functioning fully. This results in reduced productivity.
- Intermittent failures: The malfunction is irregular and unpredictable for this type of failure mode.
- Degraded failures: This type of failure mode results from fatigue from frequent usage. The system eventually becomes weaker.
- Unintentional failures: This failure typically results because another component has failed.
It's crucial to recognize that a single system or component can experience more than one type of failure mode. Document each failure mode—no detail is too small. There are also certain operating conditions, usage, and service operations that affect failure modes.
Step 3: Outline the consequences of each failure mode
After identifying all the potential failure modes, the next step is to identify the consequences of each failure mode. The effects range from minor to severe.
For example, in a food processing facility, a motor overheating (failure mode) results in minor production slowdowns (minor consequences) or complete line shutdown with product contamination (severe impact).
Step 4: Assign severity ranking to each failure mode
Next, determine the severity of each failure mode on the system, subsystems, components, users, and other relevant stakeholders. The degree of severity varies for each failure mode, system, and component. The higher the severity ranking, the more serious the failure mode.
Rank failure modes based on the following criteria:
- 9-10: Anything that impacts safety and regulatory compliance.
- 7-8: The failure mode results in the system or component losing its primary function or experiencing a degradation of its primary function.
- 5-6: The system/component only loses or degrades its secondary function. The failure mode doesn't affect the primary function.
- 2-4: The failure mode results in annoyance, but doesn't affect system/component functionality at all.
Step 5: Identify root causes of failure
At some point, every organization, no matter how conscientious, experiences a design failure. But comprehensive DFMEA processes facilitate fewer issues post-launch.
To resolve the failure modes, you need to identify their root causes first. That's what you'll be doing at this stage.
Step 6: Assess existing design controls
Next, assess your existing design controls to determine how effectively they detect and prevent your previously brainstormed failures. Robust design controls should be able to prevent, or at least foresee, failure modes. There are two types of design controls:
- Prevention controls: These controls help eliminate failures from occurring. They include design, material, and engineering requirements as well as documentation. Prevention controls typically serve as standard operating procedures (SOPs) when undertaking projects.
- Detection controls: Rely on detection controls to identify causes of failure and failure before they occur. You use detection controls during prototyping, reliability testing, functional testing, and simulations.
Remember, the main purpose of design controls is to enable you to avoid incidents before your final product launch.
Step 7: Assign occurrence rankings to each failure mode
Use occurrence rankings to determine the likelihood of each failure mode occurring. DFMEA teams typically rely on a 1 to 10 ranking scale. Failure modes with lower occurrence rankings have minimal chances of occurring, while those with higher numbers are almost certain to occur.
Step 8: Assign detection rankings to each failure mode
As with severity and occurrence rankings, evaluate detection rankings on a scale of 1 to 10. Only this time, ask yourself, how likely are we to detect each of the identified failure modes before they occur?
The goal is to determine the effectiveness of your existing design controls in detecting problems before occurring. Lower detection rankings mean it's highly likely your team will uncover issues. Alternatively, the higher the detection ranking the less plausible it is to foresee the failure mode occurring.
Step 9: Calculate risk priority numbers
Knowing your risk priority numbers (RPNs) is key to determining which design problems team members should resolve first.
Give the failure modes with the highest RPNs top priority. After assigning the ratings, calculate the RPN for each issue by multiplying the severity number, the occurrence number, and the detection number.
Risk priority number formula:
RPN = Occurrence × Severity × Detection
Step 10: Establish corrective actions
At this stage, you have uncovered information that suggests the need for modifications to existing design processes. Establish an acceptable RPN for the failure modes and document your corrective actions. In addition, identify any tools you will need to lower your RPN.
Step 11: Start a corrective action plan
Once you've developed your action plan(s), it's time to get to work. Get everyone on board and start your product design action plan. At the end of your implementation period, recalculate the RPN to evaluate measurable progress.
Did your team manage to lower its occurrence and severity rankings? Did the detection ranking increase? When it comes to maintenance, asset management, and equipment inventory management, we recommend using a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) like MaintainX to track your progress.
A user-friendly maintenance management system streamlines data management, saves time with digital procedural checklists, and provides meaningful metrics that support effective operations and maintenance decision-making.
Design failure mode and effects analysis practice example
Check out this example of a DFMEA conducted for developing an automobile front door at a manufacturing plant compiled by ReliantSoft.
The next section will highlight some of the most common errors companies make when implementing both general and design failure mode and effect analyses.
Common mistakes made with design failure mode and effects analysis
Watch out for these mistakes that trip up most teams doing their first DFMEA:
1. They don't integrate failure mode and effects analysis types
Lack of integration is a common occurrence in many organizations. It's not unusual for leadership to handle various projects in isolation despite significant overlap between roles and departments.
You can't effectively perform DFMEA while ignoring process failure mode and effects analysis (PFMEA). Process FMEA focuses on evaluating potential setbacks to operational processes that disrupt deliverables. It helps maintenance departments prioritize preventive maintenance by providing a method to measure varying consequences of asset breakdowns. Process FMEA also serves as a catalyst for decreasing production costs, eliminating production waste, and reducing downtime.
2. Incorrect failure mode and effects analysis ownership
Another common beginner's mistake is tasking quality control departments with complete ownership of DFMEA. This oversight is harmful because quality engineers aren't typically the primary executors of the design and production processes under review.
They lack first-hand knowledge about system details, design requirements, and how product development changes will ultimately impact end-users. For this reason, it's wise to task the project to product designers and assign other department members supporting roles.
3. Incomplete taskforces
Besides ownership, team composition is also often a major challenge for organizations. If you select the wrong people to make up the team, you'll end up with ineffective risk mitigation measures. In fact, you may end up making things worse.
Always form your team with people knowledgeable about design and customer requirements and how to meet them. Include the primary department of the system on the team.
4. Poor timing
Unfortunately, it's sometimes possible to do everything right, but at the wrong time. How does one perform analysis at the wrong time? They don't think about the framework until something goes wrong.
This leads to organizations running the analysis just to complete the paperwork. It becomes another process requirement to meet, instead of proactively looking for ways to improve your systems and products.
Instead of making DFMEA an expensive afterthought, aim to complete the analysis during the product design phase. You can't initiate a process FMEA and system FMEA first, then complete DFMEA later. DFMEA comes first, followed by the others.
Streamline design failure mode and effects analysis with digital tools
Design FMEA is your best shot at catching expensive problems before they shut down your production line. However, the real value comes from connecting your DFMEA insights to ongoing maintenance operations.
MaintainX bridges this gap by providing a mobile-first platform that turns your design analysis into actionable maintenance strategies. Our system helps you track RPN calculations, monitor corrective actions, and maintain visibility across all sites—exactly what maintenance professionals need to keep the physical world running efficiently.
Ready to connect your design analysis to smarter maintenance operations? Sign up for free and see how MaintainX transforms quality insights into operational excellence.
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