FMEA Analysis Template
Identify risks so you can optimize and stabilize business processes.
Trusted by 65M+ users and leading companies
About the FMEA Analysis Template
FMEA stands for Failure Mode and Effects Analysis. FMEA is a tool that helps organizations identify problems with a product, service, or process in order to assess their potential impact.
Customers expect the best. They want quality and consistency. But problems still arise — and they can be expensive. Finding a problem or defect late in the production cycle can be expensive and cause costly delays.
This FMEA analysis template enables you to discover potential issues before they impact the customer. Understand your potential failures and their associated risks, put together action plans to fix those problems, and evaluate the results of those action plans.
How to complete an FMEA analysis in 5 steps
The FMEA analysis template guides you through the systemic process of identifying risks in business processes. The template covers the following aspects:
Failure Mode - The way in which a process, product, or system could potentially fail. For example, a failure mode in a manufacturing process could be a machine malfunction, a software bug, or a material defect.
Effects - The consequences or outcomes resulting from the identified failure modes. This step involves assessing the impact of each failure mode on the overall process or system.
Analysis - This step involves a systematic and thorough examination of the identified failure modes and their effects. The goal is to understand the potential causes of failure and the implications for the overall system.
Here's a breakdown of how to use the template effectively:
Step 1: Pick the process
First, you need to identify the process you’d like to examine. This shouldn’t be a simple one or two-step process, but something more intricate with more downstream effects. Use your process map to review the steps in that process.
Step 2: Identify failure modes
Now, you need to brainstorm potential failure modes for each step — that is, any way in which that step might fail to perform its intended function.
Step 3: Estimate the impact
After you’ve identified each potential cause of a failure, you need to brainstorm potential effects associated with each failure mode. If the step fails, how will it impact the process, system, or product? Be as specific as possible.
Step 4: Assign a severity ranking
Now, you have to determine the potential damage of this failure occurring by assigning a Risk Priority Number (RPN). If this failure occurred, how severe would the impact be? Consider the impact on your customers, operations, or your employees. How frequently do you think this failure might occur? Is it likely to occur often? Or is it rare?
Step 5: Develop a plan
Finally, you need to develop a recommended action — or multiple actions — that deal with the problem. How can you go about fixing the problem, or reducing its severity? Who is responsible for fixing it? What does the timeline look like?
What is the general purpose of FMEA?
The general purpose of an FMEA analysis is to identify and prevent potential failures in a product, service, or process before they cause damage.
How do you identify failure modes?
To identify failure modes, first you have to pick a process and walk through the various steps of the process. Once you’ve spelled out each step, think of any action related to completing this step in the overall process. Then, assess each action individually and determine if there are ways that it can go wrong (failure modes). This can be technical failure or human error.
Get started with this template right now.
Product Backlog Template
Works best for:
Agile Methodology, Kanban Boards, Product Management
Development teams are often juggling many products at once. A product backlog is a project management tool that helps teams keep track of projects in flight as they build and iterate, so you can store everyone's ideas, plan epics, and prioritize tasks. The highest-priority tasks are at the top of the product backlog, so your team knows what to work on first. Product backlogs make it easier for teams to plan and allocate resources, but it also provides a single source of truth for everyone to know what development teams are working on.
User Story Map Template
Works best for:
Marketing, Desk Research, Mapping
Popularized by Jeff Patton in 2005, the user story mapping technique is an agile way to manage product backlogs. Whether you’re working alone or with a product team, you can leverage user story mapping to plan product releases. User story maps help teams stay focused on the business value and release features that customers care about. The framework helps to get a shared understanding for the cross-functional team of what needs to be done to satisfy customers' needs.
SIPOC Template
Works best for:
Agile Methodology, Strategic Planning, Mapping
A SIPOC diagram maps a process at a high level by identifying the potential gaps between suppliers and input specifications and between customers and output specifications. SIPOC identifies feedback and feed-forward loops between customers, suppliers, and the processes and jump-starts the team to think in terms of cause and effect.
Agenda Template
Works best for:
Project Management, Meetings, Workshops
Even when you’ve hosted meetings for years, hosting them online is different. Keeping them structured, purposeful, and on-task is key. That all starts with having a detailed agenda, and this template makes it so easy for you to create one.
Kaizen Report Template
Works best for:
Agile Methodology, Operations, Documentation
What makes a great company great? They know that greatness needs to be fostered and maintained — meaning they never stop working to improve. If you’re one of those companies (or aspire to be), a kaizen report is an ideal tool. It creates a simple visual guide to continuous improvement activities on a team, departmental, and organizational level. Using a kaizen report approach, every employee in an organization audits their own processes and understands what they might have overlooked, making this a powerful tool for increasing accountability at all levels.
Jobs to be Done template
Works best for:
Ideation, Design Thinking, Brainstorming
It’s all about a job done right — customers “hire” a product or service to do a “job,” and if it's not done right, the customer will find someone to do it better. Built on that simple premise, the Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) framework helps entrepreneurs, start-ups, and business managers define who their customer is and see unmet needs in the market. A standard job story lets you see things from your customers’ perspective by telling their story with a “When I…I Want To…So That I …” story structure.