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A Novel Risk Based Prioritization Methodology for the Improvement Activities of Technical Characteristics in a Production Process
Ahmet Beskese, Gul Tekin Temur and Elif Haktanir
Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) is a widely used method to define the failure modes those give harm to a system the most. However, it falls short in decreasing the total risk in the system at the maximum level possible at once, since it focuses on conducting only one corrective action at a time for curing the highest risk failure mode. Although it can still decrease the total risk significantly, since it is done via several iterations, it can be considered slow and costly. Considering the hyper competitive environment in contemporary business life, to overcome this important shortcoming, this study proposes a novel approach which includes the combination of FMEA and quality function deployment (QFD) under decomposed fuzzy environment. There are many studies in the literature combining FMEA with QFD, yet this is the only one to the best of the authors’ knowledge that starts with FMEA and feeds QFD with its findings. This significantly original approach lets the practitioners define the technical characteristics those decrease the overall risk of the system the most at once, in only one iteration. Then, improvement activities can be defined for the highest priority technical characteristics. To deal with uncertainty and ambiguity in the decision process, and varying perspectives of decision makers, decomposed fuzzy sets are used to provide the decision makers with the ability to use an optimistic and a pessimistic expression for each evaluation they make.
Keywords: Failure modes and effects analysis, quality function deployment, decomposed fuzzy sets