Despite the myriad powerful tools available for predicting and analyzing failures, engineers and manufacturers continue to be blindsided by new process or product failures. Here consultant, ASME member and Six Sigma black belt Scott Burr proposes inventing failures to better understand them and thus prevent them.

Powerful tools such as Failure Mode Effects Analysis (FMEA), Root Cause Analysis, “5 Whys” and brainstorming are available today for predicting and analyzing failures. Why, then, are obvious failure modes still happening even in established industries such as automotive? Or why do mysterious failures remain unexplained even in high-reliability industries, loaded with talented Ph.Ds, such as in aerospace?

It is incredibly frustrating to be blindsided by a new or unexplained failure mode. Stress rises when you are the lead on a project and neither you nor other experts can find the problem or prevent it with experience, training or today’s top tools. And it can be devastating when the failure is related to your personal reputation or your company’s industry standing.

Despite engineering reliance on these tools (FMEA, etc.), they have not been fully effective in preventing new process or product failures. While their use can fill in obvious known mechanisms for failure in order to predict or analyze viable — but not apparent — failures on a new product (without the benefit of experience), one must adopt a mindset of innovation. This innovative mindset is one that actively creates or invents ways for a failure to occur using the obvious resources that are within the immediate environment and its value chain…at a minimum.

Simply put, if you can invent a failure using available resources, then you will better understand HOW it is created. Then you can create strategies to prevent it.

Within this paradigm shift, one both looks at resources that typically are considered useful and tries to see them from the standpoint of being harmful. In a way, the engineer thinks “in reverse.” Rather than try to create a hardy product/process, the engineer looks at a solid product/process and attempts to break it using only the resources that are already available. It is even better when the breaking process can be made undetectable.

Common resources, to name a few, can include machines, tools, measurement equipment, facilities and people. All of these “good resources” can be viewed as harmful, and with a bit of imagination, we can “invent” many viable scenarios for failure that are readily missed by traditional brainstorming or FMEA.

This mindset, along with a disciplined set of basic innovation skills, makes for a powerful methodology — a methodology that has been used effectively to analyze, predict and explain failure modes that were “unexplainable” or explained improperly.

This approach to understanding failure is part of an emerging family of tools called Structured Innovation. Here follows a brief description of such tools and the benefits they can bring to engineers alongside established failure toolsets:

1. Inventive Failure Analysis
Failures are analyzed by identifying combinations of harmful resources that have the potential to create a failure mode with the same symptoms that currently are displayed with the existing failure. Several scenarios are developed based on the likelihood of accessibility to those resources. If the scenario is highly plausible on the basis of symptoms, but a key resource does not exist, we mine the resources within the value chain to “invent” a way for the resource to be created.

2. Inventive Failure Prediction
Failure prediction works in a similar way, but we take the resources within a super-system and the value chain and we actively invent ways to use those resources to create harm to the system. Simply put, we envision the value chain and other major interacting systems as a source of harm to design. We also actively combine resources within the value chain to maximize the potential for harm.

3. The Evolution of Systems
The evolution of systems is a series of patterns that identify and describe how technological systems evolve. These patterns are useful to help identify trends in the evolution of systems that lead to failure. The patterns are based on the wisdom and knowledge of previous failures.

Once we have actively invented several ways for failure to occur and studied the evolution of our system and the systems with which it interacts, our understanding of the total system’s weakness is greatly enhanced. We then use that information to identify system weakness as it relates to its ultimate technological evolutionary destiny. Then we use basic innovation skills to set a stronger direction (one that uses the evolutionary patterns to advantage). A system strengthened in this way will exhibit a robust behavior against failure and will find better support in the marketplace.

Structured Innovation and Inventive Failure toolsets are powerful strategies that help engineers understand failure when all other methods (including Six Sigma, Lean and other supercharged methodologies) have failed to produce a viable answer.

Engineers experienced in these methodologies find themselves asked to use their skills on the most challenging and difficult failure situations — situations where no one has ever been able to produce results using any other approach.

The beauty of these methodologies is this: these tools do not require the practitioner to have special experience in the problem area. Rather, he or she needs only gather inputs from subject matter experts and apply the toolsets to be successful.

These tools have helped a major aerospace manufacturer predict and explain potential failure modes that matched lockstep with highly accelerated life testing on a new product. Similar, a major automotive manufacturer is using this toolset to understand potential factory issues and to strengthen its design to be robust — even when the assembly process is different across several plants.

Inventive Failure Analysis, Inventive Failure Prediction and Evolutionary Patterns are emerging tools that can support engineering efforts to achieve a failure-free system and factory.

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Scott Burr is Principal Consultant, Hubenthal Burr Associates. A member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) for his entire career, he has about 24 years’ experience in recognizing and solving challenging problems in factories and business processes. For the past 7-8 years, Burr has been active as the Chair of Professional Development in Silicon Valley, and he was recently appointed as the Chair of Professional Development for the Pacific West Coast District for the ASME. He is also a certified Six Sigma Black Belt, by the Juran Institute.