Using Microsoft Access to develop a FMECA

In essence the people who work in the reliability and maintenance field are engineers, but I think in great part we are also data managers, for this reason we use a lot of software to manage and process all the necessary data in orden to accomplish our objetives in the moment to develop any kind of analysis for any kind of asset. 

There is a lot of data base managers in the market ones better than others, with awesome capabilities, but when you don't have any of it, to make your magic possible, then, there is no way than the long way, but the long way no have to be so long after all. Almost everybody has Microsoft Office in the computer, but just a few know other programs apart of Word, Excel and Power Point. One of the less used tool is the data base manager named Microsoft Access. This one is a powerful tool to create and manage data bases, is versatile, secure and relatively easy to use, of course we need some knowledge about basic programming if you want to push a little bit, but no big deal. 

Now let's talk about FMECA or Failure mode, effects, and criticality analysis, is a bottom-up, inductive analytical method which may be performed at either the functional or piece-part level. FMECA extends FMEA by including a criticality analysis, which is used to chart the probability of failure modes against the severity of their consequences. Some times is really difficult execute this kind of analysis in a piece of paper or Excel Sheet or even in a sophisticate software (of course this one could be a expensive option). I will focus only in show that is possible use this tool to develop a FMECA, of course I have previously built a data base to do that.

First at all, is possible make a FMEA or FMECA or even a RCM (we gonna focus on the first and second, the third could be material for next article) with the help of Microsoft Access and of course with a little of patient, after the first building you could make a design to make all the quantity of analysis you need and with the structure that you really need.

To do that, the first step is design a relationship structure between all the data you will use. Is necessary be clear in the connections between the data in order to manipulate the data in an easy way possible in the moment that you use the new data base. This one is the relationship structure that I have builded to manage data about FMECA. Is important denote that I have used criteria of a few international standards like SAE JA1012, MIL-STD-882, ISO 14224 and even an internal PDVSA (Venezuelan Oil&Gas Industry) standards to define the severity of the consequences and other internal PDVSA standard to define the matrix to define the criticality. The last one focus on the impact of the failures, in production, environment and the people.

We can desing the data base as confortable as possible, in this way we could use it in a effective way. In the picture above, it is showed a main windows of the data base, in witch one you can write the information about the system objet of study and the sub system components.

After defined el subsystems, the logical step is define each one of the components that conform each one of the subsystems. I recommend to you finish this part for each one of the subsystems and components and later when you got all this data continue with the next step, define the function of each one of the components of your subsystems. I recommend to you redact the function in a clear and easy way as possible, with no fancy words.

Next you have to redact the functional failure, in this part you just have to write in negative the description of the function component.

For each piece-part or each function covered by the analysis, a complete list of failure modes is developed. For functional FMECA, typical failure modes include:

• Untimely operation
• Failure to operate when required
• Loss of output
• Intermittent output
• Erroneous output (given the current condition)
• Invalid output (for any condition)

Of course next is the following would be the hierarchy of failure modes based on their criticality, I had choose a semi-quantitative method to calculate the criticality, and that depend of many thing like: standard used, kind equipment, asset configuration(with redundancy or not), operational policy, environment, etc.

To finish this kind of analysis, for sure the next is the necessary tasks to mitigate the failure modes and there is many ways to do this, I have decide do it in a simple way, becase it will be just a guide to design or redesign better maintenance policies and plans in order to be in the same direction of the economics and operacional indicators of the company. Previous to this work, I collect a lot of data about operations and maintenance based in ISO 14224 and this allow me determined some frequencies for the maintenance tasks and identify the main activity to mitigate the failure mode, inspection, replace, repair, etc.

It is a example of the results, a different way to see the FMECA report.

And this is the way to show the maintenance task already sorted by criticality.

I made this just to take a rapid look about where were the failure modes in the matrix of criticality, in this way I had a wide vision about the criticality of the component of my system. In this specific case great part is in low criticality because this asset has a parallel configuration.

To finish, I encourage you to use more tool like this, in the beginning it will take time but once you have built the data base, the rest go to be easy, of course you have to have some knowledge about how to do a FMECA/FMEA because the work of buid a data base is just carpintery, the real work is translate the methodology that you use to the data base to manipulate the info in a better way. I recommend to you spend more time talking with the personal in charge of the operation and maintenance at the time to do this kind of analisys becasue nobody more than them, know better the asset, I usesully spend more that 60% of my time doing this with greats results, the rest of the time behind my desk analysing the data and buiding the report and recomendations.