Is There a Better Way than RPN?

Abstract

Carl and Fred take on the subject of Risk Priority Number, also called RPN, when used in FMEA. Is RPN a good way to prioritize risk in an FMEA, or is there a better way?

Key Points

Join Carl and Fred as they discuss different ways to use severity, occurrence and detection in FMEA applications.

Topics include:

• Explanation of RPN calculation


• Limitations of RPN


• MIL-STD-1629A (see Show Notes below for correction)


• Different approaches to FMEA risk prioritization


• SxO versus SxOxD


• RPN has less support in recent standards


• Primary issue with RPN, if it is used


• High-severity, low RPN can be high risk


• RPN thresholds can create a “numbers game”


• Reducing severity risk, using fail safe or fault tolerance


• Use of Action Priority Table rather than RPN


• Importance of the FMEA right team

Enjoy an episode of Speaking of Reliability. Where you can join friends as they discuss reliability topics. Join us as we discuss topics ranging from design for reliability techniques to field data analysis approaches.

Show Notes

Correction: In this podcast, at about one minute and 30 seconds into the recording, I mistakenly say that MIL-STD-1629A was cancelled in 1980. I should have said the 1980 version of MIL-STD-1629A was cancelled in 1998. Attached here is the official “Notice of Cancellation” for MIL-STD-1629A. Although MIL-STD-1629A is cancelled, it is still being used in selected applications.

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