Extended FMEA for Sustainable Manufacturing: An Empirical Study in the Non-Woven Fabrics Industry

Failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) substantially facilitates the efforts of industrial manufacturers in prioritizing failures that require corrective actions to continuously improve product quality. However, the conventional approach fails to provide satisfactory explanation of the aggregate effects of a failure from different perspectives such as technical severity, economic severity, and production capacity in some practical applications. To fulfill the existing gap in the FMEA literature, this paper proposes an extension by considering associated quality cost and the capability of failure detection system as additional determinants to signify the priority level for each failure mode. The quality cost and capacity are considered as key factors for sustainable survival and development of an industrial manufacturer in the fierce competition market these days. The performance of the extended scheme was tested in an empirical case at a non-woven fabrics manufacturer. Analytical results indicate that the proposed approach outperforms the traditional one and remarkably reduces the percentage of defective fabrics from about 2.41% before the trial period to 1.13%, thus significantly reducing wastes and increasing operation efficiency, thereby providing valuable advantages to improve organizational competition power for their sustainable growth.