History

Procedures for conducting FMECA were described in US Armed Forces Military Procedures document MIL-P-1629 (1949); revised in 1980 as MIL-STD-1629A By the early 1960s, contractors for the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) were using variations of FMECA or FMEA under a variety of names.NASA programs using FMEA variants included Apollo, Viking, Voyager, Magellan, Galileo, and Skylab.The civil aviation industry was an early adopter of FMEA, with the Society for Automotive Engineers (SAE) publishing ARP926 in 1967. After two revisions, ARP926 has been replaced by ARP4761, which is now broadly used in civil aviation.

During the 1970s, use of FMEA and related techniques spread to other industries. In 1971 NASA prepared a report for the U.S. Geological Survey recommending the use of FMEA in assessment of offshore petroleum exploration. A 1973 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report described the application of FMEA to wastewater treatment plants. FMEA as application for HACCP on the Apollo Space Program moved into the food industry in general.

The automotive industry began to use FMEA by the mid 1970s. The Ford Motor Company introduced FMEA to the automotive industry for safety and regulatory consideration after the Pinto affair. Ford applied the same approach to processes (PFMEA) to consider potential process induced failures prior to launching production. In 1993 the Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG) first published an FMEA standard for the automotive industry. It is now in its fourth edition.The SAE first published related standard J1739 in 1994. This standard is also now in its fourth edition.

Although initially developed by the military, FMEA methodology is now extensively used in a variety of industries including semiconductor processing, food service, plastics, software, and healthcare. Toyota has taken this one step further with its Design Review Based on Failure Mode (DRBFM) approach. The method is now supported by the American Society for Quality which provides detailed guides on applying the method.The standard Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) and Failure Modes, Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) procedures however, do not identify the product failure mechanisms and models, which limits their applicability to provide a meaningful input to critical procedures such as virtual qualification, root cause analysis, accelerated test programs, and to remaining life assessment. To overcome the shortcomings of FMEA and FMECA a Failure Modes, Mechanisms and Effect Analysis (FMMEA) has often been used.