Resource Centers
Severity, Occurrence and Detection Ratings
The criteria for evaluating severity, occurrence, and detection are mission critical for the success of an FMEA.
- They establish the basis for determining the risk of one failure mode and effect relative to another.
- The evaluation criteria for DFMEAs and PFMEAs is different.
- The same evaluation criteria for DFMEAs and PMFEAs should be used consistently throughout your organization. This will make it possible to compare technical risks from different FMEAs to one another.
It is helpful to customize rating criteria so that they are relevant to your organization.
- Your products and processes will be reflected in customized rating scales.
- Not only are customized rating scales easier for FMEA Team members to relate to and use, but they make the ranking and ultimately the priority for Risk Optimization more meaningful.
- If your organization does both DFMEAs and PFMEAs, there should be a customized ranking scale for each type of FMEA.
The best way to customize evaluation criteria is to start with a standard, generic scale and then modify it to be more meaningful to your organization.
- As you add examples specific to your organization, consider adding several columns with each column focused on a topic.
- One topic could provide descriptions of severity levels for operational failures, another column for customer satisfaction failures, and a third for environmental, health, and safety issues.
All of our FMEA Courses include training in how to customize rating scales.
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