3.1 FMEA Case Study
The case study presented in this section is the application of the FMEA analysis explained in this paper for analysing data from
maintenance system of a food factory (6).
The failure modes detected for the factory were based on a study of 21,624 corrective work orders with 17,148 allocated to a
failure mode, noting that the General failure mode which is used as a catch-all contained 1,068 work orders. Hence 16,080
work orders were attributed to useful failure modes, which represent 74% of the data. It would be preferred to see over 80% so
attributed but found it necessary to dump numbers of work orders into the General category since they represented highly
infrequent failure modes (i.e. less than 5 work orders for the failure mode over the period of four years).
Failure modes and their impact on the plant are tabulated below. This body of work represented $6.11M of maintenance costs
over four years. A plot of the top 10 failure modes is shown in Figure 1. The N Equip refers to the number of equipment which
are affected by the relevant failure mode.