FMEA is a systematic, bottom-up, inductive method for identifying potential failure modes in a system, product, or process. For each failure mode, it assesses the potential effects or consequences, their severity, likelihood of occurrence, and the ability to detect them. The goal is to prioritize and mitigate high-risk failure modes before they occur. The ranked risks are then weighed against the expected gains, which gives the team a practical view of the risk to benefit ratio of the design. FMEA is another of the design acronyms that engineers should define once for non-specialists.
