and prioritise the potential failure modes before failures occur and evaluate the effects of these failures on the production process. The FMEA technique expands the traditional risk evaluation process by including a detection factor for each project risk in addition to the likelihood and impact factors. This detection factor represents an organisation’s ability to detect a product fault before it is shipped by the manufacturer (Carbone & Tippett, 2004).
While FMEA is used to reduce the risks associated with the technical aspects of the design and planning processes of product development, RFMEA is used to quantify and analyse risks, specifically in the project environment (Mastroianni, 2011). The difference between the two techniques is in the definition of the detection technique. For FMEA, the detection attribute is assigned a high value if a company has no method of detecting that a product fault will occur and a low value if they do have the ability to detect a fault. For RFMEA, the detection factor is a measure of the ability to foresee a particular risk event with sufficient time to plan for it (Carbone & Tippett, 2004).