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Home » Failure mode

by Fred Schenkelberg Leave a Comment

Failure mode

« Back to Glossary Index
Decision Type:
Method Category:
Categories: Terms

The observable consequence of the mechanism through which the failure occurs, i.e., short, open, fracture, excessive wear, etc.

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  • Two Approaches to Reliability
    There are two basic approaches when addressing product reliability: Reactive or Proactive. Neither is right or wrong.
  • Failure mode and effects analysis
    A qualitative and systematic analysis method intended to identify, prioritize, and reduce technical risks of failures to an acceptable level, with emphasis on improving product design or manufacturing process. FMEA is a structured process used to identify and prioritize potential failure modes that should receive an appropriate level of mitigation (elimination, reduction, or prevention).
  • Pareto analysis 
    A graphical display of count, frequency or percentages of failure modes, mechanisms, or sources of variation ordered from highest to lowest contribution to overall product or system issues. A Pareto analysis provides an simple method for an organization to identify the costliest or most often occurring events.
  • Improvable failure rate
    The difference between the failure rate of an item on newly designed equipment and the expected failure rate after product improvement to eliminate dominant failure modes; this reduction in the failure rate is generally exponential and can be predicted from early failure data.
  • Critical failure mode
    A failure mode whose ultimate effect can be a critical failure.
  • Criticality
    A relative measure of the consequence and frequency of occurrence of a failure mode.
« Back to Glossary Index

About Fred Schenkelberg

I am the reliability expert at FMS Reliability, a reliability engineering and management consulting firm I founded in 2004. I left Hewlett Packard (HP)’s Reliability Team, where I helped create a culture of reliability across the corporation, to assist other organizations.

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