Relex FMEA/FMECA Tools
	Relex FMEA/FMECA was designed to handle your Failure Mode and Effects Analyses with unsurpassed power and flexibility. The methodology contained within Relex FMEA/FMECA allows you to quickly and easily analyze the potential failure modes of your system and the resulting effects of those failures.

What is FMEA, what is FMECA? A Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (also referred to as a FMEA or FMECA) is a bottoms up approach to analyzing system design and performance.

To begin a FMEA or FMECA, the lowest levels of the system are outlined. This can be the individual components (referred to as a piece part FMEA) or the lowest level assemblies in the system (referred to as a functional FMEA). For each lowest level, a list of potential failure modes is generated. Effects of each potential failure mode are then determined.

For example, perhaps you are performing a piece part FMEA on a computer monitor. One component in that computer monitor might be a capacitor. You have determined that there are 2 potential failure modes for the capacitor, and they are that the capacitor could fail 'open' or it could fail 'shorted'. If the capacitor fails open, the effect might be that the monitor appears with wavy lines. However, if the capacitor fails shorted, the effect might be that the monitor goes completely blank.

In the case above, if the capacitor fails shorted and the monitor goes blank, that failure mode could be considered more severe or critical than if the capacitor fails open and wavy lines appear. In this case, you would attempt to find ways to prevent these failures from happening or lessen their criticality.

A FMECA can use failure rate calculations that were performed during the Reliability Prediction portion of an analysis to determine probability of occurrence. Failure Rate is a value describing how often a component or assembly will fail. In a FMECA, Failure Rate is used to compute Mode Criticality, or the probability that a particular failure mode is actually going to occur. Therefore, the ability to perform both of these analyses in one software package (and share data between those programs) would be a tremendous time-saver. Relex offers that ability in its fully integrated reliability analysis tool.

Like a reliability prediction analysis, FMEA tools and FMECA tools are performed based on models too. There are primarily two types of FMEAs or FMECAs. They are referred to as MIL-STD-1629 FMECAs, which are based on the military standard for performing FMECAs; or Automotive Style FMEAs, which are based on various automotive FMEA models. The Relex Software supports MIL-STD-1629, Automotive Style FMEAs, user-defined FMEAs, as well as other similar types of analysis