Help Center / FMEA
Design and process FMEAs inside the project: rows, risk, actions with owners and dates, released revisions and the gate.
The FMEA worksheet is part of the FMEA and design review add-on. Company setup shows whether your company has it. Without it, FMEAs made before stay to read and print, but nothing new can be added and nothing about the FMEA holds a gate. An admin can ask VectorXPro to switch it on.
Each FMEA gets a number, such as ENG-FM1. Nothing is deleted: a row or an FMEA you no longer need is retired, with a reason.
Choose “+ Add a row” and fill in the familiar columns: the item or process step, its function, the failure mode, its effect and Severity, the cause, prevention controls and Occurrence, detection controls and Detection, and any special characteristic. Vector works out the risk: Action Priority (High, Medium, Low) or RPN (S × O × D), whichever your company scores by.
On the web, “Bring rows in from a spreadsheet” imports an existing FMEA: pick which column holds each field. “Download as Excel” gives you the worksheet in the usual layout.
On a row that needs one, choose “+ Add an action”: say what will be done, who does it, by when, and who signs it complete. It becomes work (an FMEA action) and goes through the usual steps: accept, do, submit, sign. When it's signed, someone re-rates the row with the new ratings (“Record the new ratings”). Nobody re-rates their own action. Actions and re-rating work on iPhone and Android too.
On your phone (iPhone or Android), open an FMEA and choose “Add a Row” to add one on the spot. From a design review, a finding's More menu has “Make This an FMEA Row”: pick the FMEA, the failure mode is filled in from the finding, and the row remembers where it came from. Bringing rows in from a spreadsheet, editing rows and revisions stay on the web.
Choose “Freeze and ask” to freeze a copy of the whole FMEA as revision A and ask for approval. Someone other than the owner approves it, and it's released. Later changes go into the next letter, so a released revision never changes.
A High row (or, with RPN, a row over your company's threshold) holds the gate its FMEA answers to while it has no open action. A row whose action is signed but not yet re-rated still holds: re-rate it. A gate can also need a released DFMEA or PFMEA (“Change what this gate needs”). The gatekeeper can carry a row past the gate with a note (“Carry it forward”); the note stays on the record.
The gate's page says exactly which rows hold it and why.
When a defect is logged, link it to the FMEA row that should have caught it, or choose “It wasn’t in the FMEA”. Over time that shows how well your FMEAs predict real problems.
Engineer