Foundry and machining company · criticality upstream
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: extracting components from the documentation to identify, upstream, the criticality the FMEA lets slip. 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. A single Rabourdin screw snaps clean off. The outcome: 8 hours of production downtime.
The part was on no critical list: a single unit in service, 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 lie entirely in a component that nothing marked as sensitive.
The blocker: the criticality analysis lets components slip
A criticality analysis, however careful, remains a human decision made at a given moment: you rate what you judge sensitive, from what you know of the machine. Components fall through, not out of negligence, but because nothing marked them out.
This screw was one of them: never rated, so never stocked. As long as the critical list rests on expert memory alone, these blind spots stay invisible until a part breaks.
What criticality tooled by the documentation changes
On this type of situation, three mechanisms change the game.
Components extracted from the documentation
From the machine documentation, Mimorian extracts the full list of its components and builds their functional graph. Nothing rests on expert memory alone: every part present in the drawings shows up, including those no critical list ever mentioned.
The FMEA's blind spots brought to light
By cross-checking these components against the declared criticalities, Mimorian surfaces the parts never assessed. A single screw, with no spare in stock, rises as a point of fragility, before it breaks rather than after.
Criticality set before the failure
A component the FMEA ignored becomes visible while there is still time to rate it, monitor it and keep a spare in stock. The critical list stops depending on the memory of those who wrote it alone.
The result: criticality stops being an opinion
The part worth 8 hours of downtime is the textbook case: a component Mimorian would have extracted from the documentation and flagged before the failure, with the stock and the monitoring to match.
It is the shift from a critical list set from memory, once, to a criticality that starts from the real machine and all of its components, not only the ones you remember.
The part was on no critical list. A single unit, none in stock: nothing marked it out, until it broke and stopped everything for eight hours.
Frequently asked questions
Why does a well-kept FMEA still let critical parts slip?
Because it rests on expert judgement at a given moment: you rate what you judge sensitive from what you know. Real components of the machine never appear in it. Mimorian starts from the documentation to list every component and surface those no criticality covered.
How does Mimorian spot a part the FMEA forgot?
By extracting components directly from the machine documentation, then cross-checking them against the criticalities already declared. Parts present in the drawings but absent from the analysis surface, with no tag and no manual configuration.
Could this breakdown really have been avoided?
The break itself, hardly; the eight-hour stoppage, largely. A single screw with no spare in stock, flagged upstream as sensitive, would have been monitored and provisioned. Most of the lost time came from the emergency machining of a part nobody had.
Which parts does your FMEA not see?
Bring the documentation of a sensitive machine. We will show you the components it contains and the ones your criticality analysis does not cover yet.
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