Experience input needed

Hi guys, and girls

FMEA analysis input page, by Ivan Kovač

I am currently at my post graduation studies and there are a number of subjects where we have to produce an FMEA analysis of the some production line, or a product. It is a very simple procedure if you have all the data. Check here: http://syque.com/quality_tools/tools/TOOLS05.htm or just Google FMEA - you'll find tons of the links.

I am a leader of a small task group of five that has to do it. Our product is a notebook. Our aim is to analyse the overclocked (CPU/GPU) and undervolted notebook and find its weak spots, meaning what components are to consider, and what are the common failures on each of them. If a failure happens, what are the consequences? Each of these three items has some probabilities of happening. So what I need is an input from many people that have some experience in this.

Components are:
Battery and power (cord+power transformer)
HDD (+ temps)
CPU (+ temps)
GPU (+ temps)
Mainboard
System driver issues
I/O (LCD, networking, USB, Firewire, Cardreaders, PCMCIA, Optical drive, keyboard, touchpad)

The questions:
1. What component may fail?
2. When it fails, what was the cause? How likely (1-10) was that the cause?
3. When it failed, and the cause was determined, what is the consequence (effect)? How likely (1-10) will that consequence show up?

That is the main issue with this. I need as much as possible probabilities on some common failures. I have some on my own, and I would like to test it with the experience of the others. They are based on personal experience and I know they will be not objective, but at least we will get some more data. Also if you know any source that may help us with this, I would appreciate the info. Please contact me on [email protected].

This is a friendly ask for help, and please don't misuse it. I hope the results will be interesting, and the final table with sorted risks will be freely available to everyone.

Check http://www.sail.hr/fmea/fmea.asp

Edit:
Check the results pages (median and mean)


Cheers, and thanks in advance,

Ivan


EDIT: July 2006 - Check posts for a new info about the results.

Edit: 11th July 2006. The paper was done, and the marks are excellent! Interesting opinions are gathered, and I would thank to all the people that helped. Your info was good, and to our surprise the results were quite good too. As far as I know there are only a few analysis similar to ours and our online database is somehow unique. We will leave results free for everyone.
The paper is in croatian, but I am proud to tell you that the NBR forum is mentioned as the main source of the data and I would particulary thank to Mr. Chazman who helped a lot when the project was young and still in struggle for attention. This forum is a source of the great experience and now I am sure I didn't make a mistake when I started this thread.

Please check the thread for the results.

Thanks again to all of you, and cheers,

Ivan

 

Looks like a great project to collaborate on - I submitted two instances of mine - BIOS Flash failure, and a Power Surge.
I will have more to add after I gather more data.

Guys, check this out - not hard to do. If you've experienced any component failure in your notebook before, fill it out.

Chaz

 

Thanks Chaz, I owe you a favor

I just woke up (it is a big time difference, and that is why the communication is a bit tricky), and checked the table - yes green fields started to show. I appreciate your and any future inputs.

Remeber guys - if something is there, please feel free to give your opinion, the more numbers we have - the better will be the result. If you need to make a new suggestion, you are welcome to do it.

Dead battery? CPU? Motherboard problems? USB. There are so many things that can go wrong in a notebook, right?

And - another thing - Firefox seems to ignore the hand cursor on the table (I think it is an IE feature), colorcoded components, and green fields for marking the online input. I am working on it, and will make it visible on both browsers.

Cheers,

Ivan

 

Firefox colours fixed. Notice that colours are just for easier reading the groups, nothing special.
Green fields at the beggining are now visible in FF.
ID numbers got their links, so data can be entered through PDA, for example, without fancy javascript.
Hand cursor is now visible in FF too.
Cleaner look.

Cheers,

Ivan

 

I have optimized the page code - instead of around 60KB per refresh - it is 45 KB now. As I can see some people did make new inputs, some of them are very interesting. Thanks people. Keep on.

Cheers,
Ivan

 

A new layout for easier reading is done. Help is better now.

 

Glad to see you're getting input Ivan; I put a blurb for you in the current news bits. Perhaps you'll get a few more hits.

Chaz

 

Thanks Chaz. Yes the database is filling up.

CHeers,

Ivan

 

On an IBM Thinkpad A22m, would "Fan Error" on attempting startup be listed as fan problems or cpu problems? Cant decide where to put it for accuracy.

 

I'd probably label that as a fan problem.

 

"Fan" it is.

 

Sorry for the delay, I was very busy and couldn't help mstacks, but as I can see Chaz already solved that .

Anyway - there are over 100 entries (and there were like 50 from me). Database is still growing. Please make suggestions to it and of course if you have any suggestions for the database improvement - go ahead - tell me and I will see what I can do.

Thanks guys - you helped a lot already,

Ivan

 

It sounds like a great project but I doubt (given the number of different kinds of notebooks around) that you will be able to get statistically relevant conclusions. I will be glad to turn out to be wrong.

I didn't have any failures I would be able to trace back to the undervolting.

 

Hi ivar,
You may be right, but as far as I know nobody ever tried it. Our idea is to start a such project and get as much opinions as possible. At least we will be able to see top ten issues. Numbers are not so important.
And with undervolting - did you try putting 0,9 V to the 16x multiplier? I have issues then!

Ivan

 

We reached over 150 inputs. Please check the results pages. I did the mean and median analysis. Check the list of worst issues.

And thanks to all that gave their inputs, we really appreciate that. This is a good forum community.

Cheers,

Ivan

 

This is a great post! A shame I didnt see this one before. Great info Ivan.

Charlie

 

Hi Charlie,

I am glad that you noticed that. You are also welcome to give your suggestions. We would like to have people of your expertise putting their opinions into the database.

Cheers,

Ivan

 

An update:

Database inputs were analized, and similar inputs are put together to get better data. I also did an analysis by groups, so you can see what component/failure is most dangerous or irritating in each component group.

We are currently writing our project papers, and results and conclusion will be most interesting I think.

BTW - did you hear ybout Gartner annual component failure report - it is available for 95 USD. I saw only a small part - but apparently notebooks components are much better than 2 years ago, and AFR (annual failure rate) has dropped by 25%! Hard disk, LCD and mainboard are still the most responsible components when it comes to failures.

The general conclusion is that computer components can, may and finally must be much much better. I guess manufacturers started to realise that.

Cheers,

Ivan

 

Good job Ivan. As requested I input known work related from about 30 laptop failures, 5 year span. I could have had a ball with plain old user error, myself included, lol. I got about 3 "smart" HD errors from people dropping laptops so input those as well.

Mike

 

Thanks Mike! I appreciate your input. It is very good that you have had access to all that info!

Cheers,

Ivan

 

And yes - it is done! We appreciate your input. The inputs were put together when they were similar, and the median analysis was done. It showed interesting results, but for the sake of the complete FMEA, we needed another number that was missing: Occurence of the failure. That number was added based on the web, personal experience from the members of our team and service centres input.

By multiplying this number with the input gathered from you guys we got the following results (Pareto rule was used - 20% of the failures make 80% of the effects):



The results of the failure analysis without the occurence can be found here:
http://www.sail.hr/fmea/medbycomp.asp

If someone is interested in detailed numbers, please let me know and I will be glad to explain in details. As a general conclusion - take care of the heat and physical damage and your notebook will work nice for a long time. I know you know that!

And in the end:

Some people will argue these numbers - please take this project as an attempt to do something that is extremely hard to do. The more inputs we get, the better results we get. We tried to be objective and fair, but I know some will object the findings - not all people have the same opinion or rate the failure or effect in the same way. That is why we use statistics - whatever comes in as the first or second - it doesn't matter. What matters is that there are a few failures that make the majority of the bad effects and that is the point of this exploration. Overheating and physical damage are the things to take care of. Our paper covers much, much more, and we already have some ideas how to make this even better. So if you are interested in this - please give your suggestions and we may make it happen.

Cheers,

Ivan