Areas of Concern

The automotive industry has several areas of concern for FMEA’s:

• Most FMEA’s that companies perform offer little or no real improvement
• Lack of corporate consistency of FMEA documents
• Controlling supplier quality
• Problems with tracking changes – not all changes are recorded
• Lack of follow up to the changes to see if they are actually solving the problem
• Some companies do not think that they have a problem and therefore see no value in FMEA’s
• Companies will realise they need to perform an FMEA when it is too late
• Many companies do not know how to perform an FMEA properly
• Untrained staff performing FMEA’s
• Engineers do not see the value in an FMEA, they find them too labour intensive

The Fundamental Purpose of FMEA is to identify problems, improve quality, product and process.

FMEA’s are not the only concerns facing the automobile industry. Production and product quality can also be affected by job and machine safety issues. The automotive industry has several areas of concern for job safety:

• Unplanned maintenance of machinery is a major cause of high-risk events.
• Skilled employees must often bypass machine safeguards to carry out maintenance.
• Carpal Tunnel Syndrome from highly repetitive tasks.
• Assembly line work exposes workers to maintaining a pace that may promote injury from trying to catch-up to moving line.
• QS-9000 and TS/ISO standards of quality are effected by worker safety / injury.
• Just-In-Time-Inventory can be impacted from the result of a serious injury.
• A correlation of safety to quality effects the reputation of OEMs and Auto Makers.
• Robotic standards such as ANSI/RIA 15.06 require high safety standards control circuit equipment.