Established model
Failure mode and effects analysis
US armed forces; later automotive and aerospace industry · 1949
Also known as FMEA
Go through a product or process step by step and ask how each part could fail, what would follow, and how likely it is to go unnoticed.
Its place in the frameworkBusiness Core›Manufacturing Operations
What it does
Each possible failure is assessed for how serious its effect would be, how often it might occur and how well current controls would catch it, and the combination sets the priority for action. Its strength is that it is done before production, when changing the design is cheap, rather than after the failure has reached a customer.
- Reach for it when
- Before launching a new product or process, and when the same kind of defect keeps reaching customers despite inspection.
- Where it stops
- It finds failures people can imagine and misses the ones that come from interactions nobody listed. The numerical scores invite false precision, and it can become a form filled in after the design is fixed.
US Department of Defense, MIL-P-1629, Procedures for Performing a Failure Mode, Effects and Criticality Analysis, 1949; current industrial practice in the AIAG & VDA FMEA Handbook, 2019.
Why it sits at Manufacturing Operations
Where things are actually made — capacity, flow, quality and the maintenance that keeps all three possible. Applies wherever the organisation produces rather than only assembles.
A model is only useful when you reach for it at the right moment. This one answers a question that arises here — so it is filed here, and nowhere else. These are the working areas it serves:
- Capacity planningGoldratt’s theory of constraints: identify the constraint, exploit it, subordinate everything else to it.
- Production flowLean manufacturing and value stream mapping, which separate processing time from the far larger waiting time around it.
- Quality managementStatistical process control and the quality management tradition from Deming and Juran on prevention over inspection.
- MaintenanceTotal productive maintenance, and overall equipment effectiveness as the combined measure of availability, performance and quality.
What it touches elsewhere
Nothing in a business is decided on its own. A conclusion reached with this model at Manufacturing Operations lands in these other cores, whether or not anyone follows it there.
- Business CoreProduction runs on assets, and the supply chain feeds it.
- Goal CoreCapacity is a hard limit on what any growth goal can promise.
- Data CoreYield, throughput and equipment effectiveness are among the most instrumented measures in any business.
- Time CoreChangeovers, maintenance windows and lead times are all timing decisions.
Filed at the same place
These answer questions that arise at Manufacturing Operations too. Where they disagree with this one, the disagreement is the useful part.
- Overall equipment effectivenessOne number combining how much of the time equipment runs, how fast, and how much of what it makes is good.
- Value stream mappingDraw the whole path a product takes, with the waiting included, and the waiting turns out to be most of it.
- Six Sigma and DMAICReduce variation until defects are rare, working through a fixed five-step cycle with the measurements agreed up front.
Elsewhere in Business Core
- Tuckman’s stages of group development
- Belbin Team Roles
- Herzberg’s two-factor theory
- Jobs to be done
- The Kano model
- The value proposition canvas
- The business model canvas
- The Van Westendorp price sensitivity meter
- Value-based pricing
- Core competence
- VRIO
- The resource-based view
- The theory of constraints
- Lean thinking
- Co-opetition and the value net
- Transaction cost economics
- Stakeholder theory
- The power–interest grid
- DuPont analysis
- Break-even and cost–volume–profit analysis
- Unit economics
- The Kraljic Matrix
- The bullwhip effect
- The SCOR Model
- On-time in-full
- The three lines model
- ISO 31000 risk management
- Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
- Kotter’s eight-step change model
- Situational leadership
- The Lean Startup
- Design thinking
- Porter’s value chain
- The McKinsey 7S framework
- Stage-gate
- Beyond budgeting
- Dynamic capabilities
- Intangible assets
- The four S’s of intangible investment
- Net present value and discounted cash flow
- The Modigliani–Miller theorem
- The pecking order theory
- COSO Internal Control — Integrated Framework
- ISO 37301 compliance management systems
- COSO Enterprise Risk Management
- Agency theory
- Mintzberg’s organisational configurations
- The Star Model
- Lewin’s change model
- The ADKAR model
- Effectuation
- Open innovation
- The technology acceptance model
- The NIST Cybersecurity Framework
- The TOGAF Standard
- Wardley mapping
These are other people’s models, named here so you can go to the source and use them properly. The Omnigoal is not affiliated with their authors and is not endorsed by them; nothing of theirs is reproduced here — no canvas, no diagram, no wording. Each is described in our own words, with the originator credited, because the framework is a place to put thinking, not a replacement for the people who did it. Model names and trademarks belong to their respective owners and are used here only to refer to the work itself.
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