Model for the Assessment of Process Failure Mode and Effect Analysis Maturity Level in the Automotive Industry toward Industry 4.0 Trends

Abstract

According to the international industry standards, the Process Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (PFMEA) is an obligatory tool for the risk assessment in the automotive industry. Due to FMEA transition in the automotive industry (2019th), PFMEA has been subjected to a series of transformations and improvements, where the substantial change is the risk estimation. However, although it is an essential tool for the reliability assessment, the formal PFMEA is still not sufficiently compatible with the ongoing Industry 4.0 trends. Consequently, practitioners have increasing needs for guides that could support them to implement PFMEA toward Industry 4.0 in their companies. This study aims to ease this shift by proposing a novel model for the assessment of PFMEA maturity level, which considers four PFMEA maturity levels; where the first level corresponds to the manual handling of reports; while the level-four corresponds to the fully automated PFMEA. The overall maturity level was calculated by accounting the eight significant influential factors. Since each of the influential factors has a different degree of influence, their importance can be calculated by applying some Multi-Criteria Decision-Making method or by direct assessment. Finally, the usage of the proposed maturity model was demonstrated by the case study, and obtained results proved that the proposed model is suitable and applicable in a real production environment in the automotive industry, with the emphasis that it could be extended for other industries.