From Apollo Rockets to the Modern Factory: The Untold Story of FMEA and Its Digital Revolution
Forget brainstorming and blue-sky thinking sessions. True innovation in reliability doesn't come from sudden inspiration, but from a disciplined process of structured pessimism. It's a technique that forces engineers to become their own fiercest critics, to methodically imagine every way their creation could possibly fail. This method is Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA), and its journey from military procedures to modern web tools has transformed how the world builds safe and dependable products. Military Origins: A Cold War Necessity The story of FMEA begins in the crucible of post-war military technology. In the late 1940s, the U.S. military faced a critical problem: its increasingly complex equipment was failing at an alarming rate. Reliability wasn't a luxury; it was a strategic necessity. In response, a formalized procedure was developed, documented in military standard MIL-P-1629 . For the first time, engineers had a systematic method to ask three fundamental...