Foundry and machining company · living FMEA
8 hours of downtime caused by a part the FMEA never saw
At a foundry and machining company, an ordinary-looking part breaks. It had never been rated critical. Production stops for 8 hours.
About this case
A breakdown experienced and recounted by the site itself, before any Mimorian tooling. What the page describes next is what Mimorian brings to this type of situation: recurrence detection and criticality recalculated from the real history. Site anonymised.
The situation: an ordinary part, a major stoppage
The site keeps its FMEA up to date, like many do: criticality set by expert judgement, reviewed from time to time. A single Rabourdin screw snaps clean off. The outcome: 8 hours of production downtime.
The part was on no critical list: nobody watched it, and there was no spare in stock. It had to be remade from scratch. Two hours of teardown and reassembly, five hours of machining to reproduce the part, one hour of travel: the 8 hours of downtime lie entirely in a component that nothing marked as sensitive.
The blocker: a history nobody consults
The information existed all along, scattered through the history: minor incidents, replacements, traces. But by the site's own admission, technicians do not consult the CMMS history during a breakdown. Data entry is experienced as a chore with no return.
An FMEA set by expert judgement ages: it reflects what was believed critical when it was written, not what the breakdowns have been saying since.
What genuinely exploited field experience changes
On this type of situation, three mechanisms change the game.
Recurrences surface on their own
Mimorian detects recurring failures in the history with no configuration and no manual tags. A part that breaks several times ends up visible, even when each occurrence seemed anecdotal.
Criticality is recalculated by the facts
The FMEA is enriched with real field experience: whatever stops production often or for long moves up in criticality, whatever the initial intuitions.
Data entry stops being a chore
The intervention report is dictated by voice during the intervention and flows back structured into the CMMS. The history finally fills up, and every resolved breakdown protects the next one.
The result: criticality stops being an opinion
The part worth 8 hours of downtime is the textbook case: an FMEA fed by the real history would have flagged it before the failure, with the stock and the monitoring to match.
It is the shift from a criticality declared once to a living criticality, recalculated at every intervention.
The part was on no critical list. Yet the information existed, scattered through a history nobody consulted.
Frequently asked questions
Why do FMEAs age badly?
Because they are set by expert judgement at a given moment, then rarely reviewed. Real breakdowns tell another story: a living criticality is recalculated from the history, at every intervention.
Do you have to re-tag the whole CMMS history to detect recurrences?
No configuration and no manual tags: Mimorian reads the history as it is, even poorly filled in, and surfaces the recurring failures and the parts that keep coming back.
How do you get technicians who never consult the CMMS to log their work?
By reversing the effort: the intervention report is dictated by voice during the intervention and flows back structured into the CMMS. The technician saves time, and the history becomes reliable enough to be useful.
Which parts does your FMEA not see?
Bring two years of CMMS history, even imperfect. We will show you the recurrences hiding in it.
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