The failure mode effects analysis to prevent delays for development projects in aerospace industry - A case study

Delays in development projects are prevalent in the aerospace industry. The AS9102 standard suggests that Failure Mode and Effects Analysis is an effective tool in the identification and mitigation of risks and failures. Process FMEA helps to identify failures in a production system from each work-centre. Special emphasis was placed on the identification of factors that caused serious delays or that prevented the production system from performing at levels that enabled the achievement of the customer delivery schedule. The creation of a risk matrix of the parts and the work-centres in the project yielded the individual risk scores for the individual parts being manufactured. Additional criticality was assigned to parts that experienced multiple failures, this resulted in identification of the critical work-centres, the number of failures per work-centre, the critical parts and the number of failed individual parts. This gave the project managers a comprehensive view of the risk involved in the manufacturing of the parts in the project. Despite the initial delays in the project, the customer delivery schedule of a ship-set every three weeks was achieved within 5 ship-sets. A strategy for a planned resource dilution was identified by simulating multiple levels of dilution so as to not result in delays.