The time between when an engineering prototype is built and when it’s available for reliability evaluation often is too long, which can lead to reliability disasters. DFMEA, when viewed as design failure mode and effects avoidance, can reduce this time by taking a proactive approach to reliability engineering. Rather than trying to predict how frequently a design will fail, DFMEA helps engineers choose the design that least fails. It prevents failure modes from escaping past their creation phase by detecting them quickly and deploying a countermeasure.
Read more in “Turning Hindsight Into Foresight.”