As you are probably aware by now, Ford Motor Company released their Customer-Specific Requirements for the IATF 16949 standard in January of 2022. The first question many people have is, “If we have a standard for companies to follow, why are there customer-specific requirements on top of the standard? Doesn’t that negate the need for a standard in the first place?” It’s a very valid point and one that’s under continual scrutiny.


That brings us to the Ford PFMEA requirements. What is a PFMEA? Briefly, PFMEA stands for Process Failure Mode and Effects Analysis. It is a systematic and proactive approach used in various industries to identify potential failure modes in a process and assess their potential effects. The main purpose of PFMEA is to prevent or mitigate potential problems before they occur, thus improving the overall quality and reliability of the process or product.
The PFMEA process involves a team analyzing each step of a process to identify failure modes – ways in which the process could potentially fail to produce an acceptable part. For each failure mode, the team then assesses its severity (impact on the process), occurrence (likelihood of the failure mode occurring), and detection (likelihood of the failure mode being detected). The outcome of a PFMEA is a prioritized list of potential failure modes, ranked by their Risk Priority Number (RPN), which is calculated by multiplying the severity, occurrence, and detection ratings. This rating allows the team to focus on high-risk areas and develop appropriate actions or controls to prevent the identified potential failures.

- Balloon the print (High QA automates this too!)
- Identify the characteristics linked to each manufacturing operation
- Link the Process to the Operation (simple pull-down menu)
- Generate the PFMEA
PFMEA Generation will become an automated, consistent, and controlled process that can be done in a few minutes instead of the manual, error-prone Excel method of old.
Contact High QA or visit us at major industry events to find out more about PPAP submission generation using High QA PQP!
