Six Sigma FMEA Meeting #2

We had our second Six Sigma meeting today and focused on FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis). This meeting directly built on our SIPOC diagram, more specifically on the parts of the diagram where we already have a verification process in place. So basically what we did was to quantify the severity and the occurrence of failure in each of our existing verification processes. Each of these failure modes was graded from 1 to 10, 1 being the lowest and 10 the highest. For example, a severity mode of 1 meant that when the problem occurred, it did not highly affect the billing process. To grade the occurrence of the problem we had a chart with categories, such as category 1, a category 1 meant that the problem occurred anywhere from 1 to 20 times within every 20,000 invoices billed, a category of 2 meant that the problem occurred anywhere from 20 to 100 times every 20,000 to 50,000 invoices billed, and so on until the highest category of 10. We also measured a third component, the ability to detect when a problem occurred. The ability to detect when each of our existing verification processes failed was also graded on a scale of 1 to 10. Where a grade of 1 meant that when the problem occurred, it would be immediately known. A grade of 10 meant that if the problem occurred, we would never know about it. Ok that’s all; stay tuned for meeting #3.