An Approach for Improvement of Risk Priority Number in FMEA

Abstract

Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) is a methodology for analysis of potential failure modes within a product which evaluates the risk level of failure modes by Risk Priority Number (RPN) and then proposes compensating provision. This paper seeks to address the drawbacks of the calculation of RPN index in traditional FMEA. The Enhanced Risk Priority Number (ERPN) is proposed to prioritize failure modes when two or more failure modes have the same RPN or when there is a disagreement in ranking scale for severity, occurrence and detection.