Failures in context of industrial production are not only a burden and a main reason for committee and rework but can also be a chance. When failures occur within organizations, several authors and publications have pointed out the opportunities that come with them. Through failures, an organization gets the possibility to improve corresponding processes and avoid future mistakes preventively. This is especially true for manufacturing companies. Their customers trust that products are of a continuously high quality. In addition, these companies are facing enormous challenges, for example a higher product variety or an increasing product and production plant complexity. In times of limited human and financial resources, these challenges have a huge influence on the transfer of failure information. Often, companies (are forced to) have a structured process for how to handle failures within the organization, but fail to transfer the important information gained from them to a parallel plant or to a future project. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to present a framework, which allows retrieving earlier failures at the early stage of the plant engineering phase. This serves as a basis for the further development of a supporting system in the FertiRob project. To ensure transferability in industrial practice, the framework is explained using a real-life application demonstrator. In addition, an adjusted Why-Not-Analysis with (industry) project partners is conducted. This analysis shows that there are points that need to be considered in further development while the basic implementation is possible.