High quality products, with minimum time to market at competitive prices, can meet the changing demands of the customers in the present day global competition. Concurrent Engineering (CE) tools have proved their worth in achieving the objective. Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA), one of the tools of CE, has been widely used to identify and eliminate potential failures before the product or service reaches the customer. It has been found that very limited work has been done in the area of service FMEA. A modified FMEA, with a reliability and cost-based approach, has been presented for the cooling system of passenger transport vehicles, by collecting data from a state transport corporation depot.
In a globally competitive environment, a product or a service has to make the customers
happy for their survival and hence, industries and organizations are forced to develop
products or provide services at competitive prices and market them in minimum time
for survival. This is achieved by replacing the sequential engineering process used
for the product development with Concurrent Engineering(CE) process along with its
tools such as Design for Assembly (DFA), Design for Manufacturing (DFM), Just in
Time (JIT), Intelligent Manufacturing System (IMS), Quality Engineering (QE), Failure
Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA), Knowledge-based Engineering (KBE), Design
for Logistics (DFL), Poka-Yoke, Product Delivery Process (PDP) and Taguchi Method
(Norell, 1993; Nevins and Whitney, 1989; Kosuke Ishii, 1993; Jegadheesan and
Arunachalam, 2001). Among all these developments, FMEA is the technique that has
been frequently enunciated as a solution to attain core competence. For example,
standards like QS 9000 and TS 16949(ISO, 2002) stipulate the use of FMEA by the
certifying companies. Likewise, Concurrent Engineering (Nevins and Whitney, 1989) and Six Sigma concepts encompass FMEA technique in them. Hence, considering the
potential of FMEA in the product development process, time and again, researchers
have been adding value to FMEA studies. Along with this trend, this paper contributes
to the literature on FMEA by presenting a new reliability and cost-based FMEA
(RC-FMEA) model for a passenger transport vehicle in general and the engine cooling
system in particular. The paper is structured as follows. First, the literature on FMEA
has been reported and the drawbacks of traditional FMEA are listed. The traditional
FMEA is carried out for the engine cooling system of the passenger vehicle and a new
RC-FMEA model has been proposed to overcome the drawbacks. Finally, the
conclusions are presented. |
