Identifying and managing failures in stone processing industry using cost-based FMEA

The quality of manufactured goods is one of the most important prerequisites that ensure industrial development of the countries, persistence, and the competitiveness of businesses in global market. For this reason, the lack of qualitative characteristics in the products of some manufacturing units causes the absence of their competition in the market. One of the major problems of the stone industry is lack of proper planning of management to produce high-quality stone and according to the international standards. Therefore, management techniques should be used to improve the quality of products and solve the existing problem. Despite multiple tools, failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) is an effective tool in quality management. Therefore, in this study, at first, by using FMEA technique, failures in the stone industry in Iran have been identified, and the causes of each failure, and their effects and preventive and control measures of any failure are investigated. Finally, to achieve real results, the imposed costs related to any failure in the system have been calculated, and to prioritize failures instead of the use of risk priority number (RPN) is performed by using FMEA and data envelopment analysis (DEA). Somehow, the three factors of severity, occurrence, and detection of failures as inputs and cost as undesirable output are considered in this approach. The results of FMEA-DEA approach based on the cost, at Travertine and Marble processing industry, show the abilities of the proposed approach.