Improving risk assessment for customer-oriented FMEA

Since its introduction in the aerospace industry, failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) has been proven to be an effective risk management tool and has gained popularity in various industries. All along, FMEA has been conducted according to manufacturers’ perspective. As a matter of fact, customers are also a key stakeholder group who will be affected directly if any failure modes occur. Therefore, their involvement should be considered in FMEA, but has not received much attention. Presented in this paper is an attempt to improve a customer-oriented FMEA. Customer dissatisfaction has been integrated directly into a new approach for risk assessment. Kano model has been applied to identify how customers perceive failure mode effects. A new customer-oriented risk priority number (RPN) calculation has been developed and compared with the previous customer-oriented approach as well as the traditional one. The results from a case study show that this new approach represents the customers’ perspective better than the previous one, and the factors influencing the prioritisation of the failure modes are different among the three approaches. In this new approach, how the customers perceive the effects of the failure modes has the most influence.