The number one issue we see with people performing FMEA audits is that they are not seeing results or support they intended. The cause commonly seen and the reason why you are not getting support of your audit of the FMEA is because you are not focusing on performance. We are going to present three simple ways that you can prioritize performance in your FMEA audit to get the support that you need.

Technique 1: Identify your Interested Parties and Where they Overlap

• Management
• Auditor (yourself)
• Practitioner (process owner)

Technique 2: Tailor your Results to your Interested Parties Common Interests

If your only focus on your audit scheme, the other two interested parties (management and the process owner) will not have buy-in. Therefore, when you go to produce your results, they can be marginalized and seen as not relevant to the other two parties.

This is one of the biggest problems we see with auditors, is they are not focusing on goals that other interested parties are interested in so that is the second thing, you are going to do is you want to make sure you tailor, your results.

Management: Time and Money

Auditor: Scheme Conformance

Practitioner: Performance

Technique 3: Focus on the Problems that are Actionable

When going through an FMEA audit it is likely that you will find discrepancies. One of the common things you can see a lot of times, is some of those discrepancies will take a significant amount of effort to change.

When these results of your audit are not actionable, the performance of the audit then generally decreases. This translates to the cause is a problem that is going to take tremendous amount of resource and is more of a strategic problem instead of something that can be fixed or repaired.

Review:

Identify your Interested Parties and Where they Overlap

Tailor your Results to your Interested Parties Common Interests

Focus on the Problems that are Actionable