Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) for Cataloging: An Application and Evaluation

Abstract

Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) is a proactive assessment tool originally created for quality assurance in manufacturing industries. FMEA involves the assignment of rankings for frequency, severity, and detection of errors within a process. Catalogers at ProQuest undertook an innovative project to use FMEA to evaluate MARC record production. This article provides an overview of FMEA for proofing in MARC record creation and how FMEA might be applied more effectively in a variable environment.Keywords: FMEA, quality assurance, error-proofing, MARC, cataloging 2 reach the customer. FMEA results can be used to prioritize efforts for process improvements and to reduce failures and associated risks. FMEA is about identifying causes and effects, attributable to various conditions. Through FMEA, users can anticipate and prevent problems, reduce costs, shorten product development or production times, and achieve safe and reliable products and processes. Simply put, FMEA answers questions such as: what can go wrong? how likely is an error to occur? and if an error does occur, what are the consequences of that error? There are versions of FMEA for both the process to create a product (PFMEA) and the product design (DFMEA), with DFMEA also applying to services (a variant of product).The library profession has long assessed the cataloging end-product for its ability to serve user needs. These assessments have inspired the introduction of new MARC fields, changes to descriptive standards, and even a vision for leaving the MARC record data model altogether. This application of FMEA was not to address possible errors in the design of the product (a DFMEA), but rather to analyze the process that can result in a flawed version of the intended product (a PFMEA). This article presents a case study of PFMEA application and an evaluation of the effectiveness of utilizing PFMEA for the cataloging process. Literature ReviewThis application of PFMEA, to identify, prioritize, and address process steps with failure risks, is novel to the library environment. Studies on quality assurance initiatives for processes, such as authority control in the cataloging process, have been documented extensively, but no published articles discuss a technique to identify, prioritize, and address process steps with failure risks, as is accomplished with PFMEA. The authors did, however, identify three published resources related to manufacturing process applications in libraries and cataloging process assessment techniques that are relevant to cataloging work.3 Hsieh, Chang and Lu 1 presented a review of quality management tools and techniques for improving the process to avoid errors is more efficient than inspections to detect and then fix them after the fact. They emphasize the need for ongoing process improvement and describe a cycle for planning, carrying out, studying the effect, and further improving the process. While some specific tools are mentioned for process improvement, they do not reference FMEA. The FMEA tool is included, however, ...

Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) of Honeypot-Based Cybersecurity Experiment for IoT

“…The higher value represents the lowest capabilities of current controls to detect a failure. Following the RPN calculations, corrective actions are taken to reduce the severity and frequency of potential failures or improve the capabilities to detect failures [5], [6].…”