Application of Failure Mode Effect Analysis (FMEA) to Reduce Downtime in a
Textile Share Company
A method to identify every possible failure during a process and developed Application of Failure
Mode Effect Analysis (FMEA). It is a step by step and systematic process for identifying potential
failures before they occur, with the aim to eliminate or minimize the risk associated with the failures
identified. Carl S. Carlson also articulated an advice that FMEA should be the guide to the
development of a complete set of actions that will reduce risk associated with the system,
subsystem, and component or manufacturing/assembly process to an acceptable level.
The case, Textile Share Company, one of the oldest textile mills in Ethiopia, is founded in 1961 by the
Italian government as a war compensation to Ethiopia. Currently, the company has a total capacity
of producing 15 tons of spin fibre, 50,000 meters of fabric, 82,000-meter squares of finished fabric,
and 10,000 pairs of garment products. (as of 2018)
As one of the core productions sections of the company, the weaving section at the case Textile
Share company experiences very high downtime and this study will focus on the FMEA application in
the weaving process line to identify the modes of the failures, their causes and effect and it came
with a suggestion of some remedial actions to reduce the recoded high downtime.
Problem Statement
In the weaving section of the case company, 1653 hours of downtime is recorded daily according to
the compiled daily performance evaluations of the same section. If the machines work with full
capacity, the daily working hours of the 178 machines should ideally be 178 machine x
24hrs/machine, which could have been 4272 hrs/day. This shows that the weaving machines are
down for 38.69% of the total working hours.
Objective of the Study
The objective of the study is to reduce the downtime of the case company through the application of
FMEA as a major productivity improvement tool.
Methodology
Downtime can be defined as an event that stops manufacturing processes for a significant length of
time and the stop events include machine or equipment failures, raw material shortages and
changeover time. In other words, downtime is the period which the process is off-line and not
producing any products or adding value to the products. It can also be called idle time, downtime, or
off line period. The seven wastes in any production company are excess inventory, overproduction,
waiting time, unnecessary transport, processing waste, inefficient work methods and product
defects and the waiting time is contributed by the downtime. Hence, it is much important to know
how much and when downtime the process is experiencing and to be able to attribute the lost time
to the specific source or reason for the loss. It is a common operations and production management
key performance indicator (KPI). Production companies obviously aim to reduce the amount of
downtime in a production process or at the very least should able to control it to an acceptable level.
After the collection primary and secondary data, the primary data were collected from the case
company through observations including recordings, measurements and discussions with line
managers and operators. To get relevant secondary data, the documentations of the company, with
special focus to weaving section, were critically assessed. FMEA was applied as a problem-solving
tool to analyse the collected data. In addition, cause-effect diagram and Pareto analysis were among
the supporting analysis methods applied in this research. After FMEA was conducted and tabulated
and the failure modes were identified and prioritized, the downtime observation continued with the
respective causes of the failure modes on 10 selected general-purpose machines. The FMEA
conducted according to the procedures depicted in the figure below,
Implementation phases of FMEA technique are as follows:
• Setting of FMEA team and detecting process or processes to be analysed as below list;
• Identifying failure modes
• Identifying potential effect or effects of the failure
• Identifying causes of failures
• Identifying failure severity
• Identifying failure occurrence
• Identifying detectability condition of failures
• Calculating Risk Priority Numbers (RPN)
• Making proposals thereby paying attention to values calculated
• Carrying out regulatory or preventive applications
• Comparing RPN numbers with priorities after improvement
The risk of possible failures is assessed using the risk priority number (RPN), which is
calculated on the basis of assessment of failure severity, probability of occurrence and probability of
detection.
RPN = Occurrence × Severity × Detection
Application of FMEA of the Loom Section
In the application of FMEA, the potential failure modes, their respective effects, their potential
causes and control mechanisms were fed in to an FMEA sheet and the RPN is calculated. Then, the
results of the FMEA sheet is translated into graphical presentation. However, this representation is
only with respect to the causes of the failure modes. The resulting FMEA templated table result
shows eighteen potential causes with seven potential failure modes and three critical effects were
identified in the loom section. As can be seen in Fig. 5 several failure modes and their respective
effects were identified. Moreover, the various failure modes and their respective contribution to the
higher downtime of the section were identified.
Pareto Analysis
Pareto analysis of the resulting causes also result in 20% of the causes of the failure modes with high
RPNs that contribute more than 50% of the RPN are four, the effect being the downtime of the
process. Further observations of these vital few causes on the loom machines were also made and
the results show the downtime hours that can be reduced to the possible minimum with optimized
efforts and resources.
Hence, a single machine experiences 0.07hrs of reducible downtime in a single operation hour on
average due to the four vital causes of the identified and prioritized failure modes. This hourly
downtime of a machine can be translated into the 24hrs working day of the company (three shifts)
and resulting in 1.68 hrs/day (24hrs x 0.07). Therefore, the total downtime of the 178 loom machines
that can be reduced is 299.04hrs/day.
In this case study research, downtime is found to be one of the most significant role players for
higher production loss and low productivity. As a result of the FMEA application in the weaving
section of the case company, seven potential failure modes, three critical effects and eighteen
potential causes were identified. By using Failure Mode Effect Analysis as a major tool to identify
failure modes of the different loom machines in the weaving process and by focusing on the vital few
causes of the failures, the research enables us to reduce the downtime of the subsection by 14.2%.
In other words, the findings of the research showed that, by taking appropriate corrective actions on
the 20% of the causes of the failure modes that contribute more than 50% of the RPNs, it is found
that the section can save a downtime of 299.04hrs/day. Therefore, from the above result, it can be
concluded that by applying failure mode effect analysis in the other sections of the textile
production processes, the case company can reduce its down time by a larger proportion. This in
turn results in higher productivity.