Ed - I usually use 125 as the cutoff number that requires "immediate" action (that would be above "5" each for severity, occurrence, and detection). Also anything that has a "10" for occurrence or detection should be acted upon. After that, for continuous improvement, you should Pareto-ize the RPN's and work on bringing the worse 20% (or whatever number you choose) to lower RPN's. As to the second question on where to get more info on PFMEAs, the QS-9000 PFMEA requirements manual can be bought (for a small fee) from AIAG (Automotive Industry Action Group) in Southfield, Michigan whose charter is to consolidate the requirements of the automotive OEM's. They can be reached at (248) 358-3003. They provide the background for PFMEA's but they do recommend a hard number to use as the cut-off. ____________________________________________________________________ Date: Thu, 12 Feb 1998 07:20:25 -0500 From: Ed Holton <[log in to unmask]> Subject: Automotive PFMEA for electronics assembly All of us automotive suppliers have to develop a document known as a PFMEA (Process failure mode effects analysis) about the production process. For those of you who are familiar with this document, read on: The RPN number (risk priority number) is used to rank order the concerns. For years I have used this document to identify the problems and improved those processes with the highest numbers. During a QS9000 evaluation, they want me also to set a number at which we decide to take action, (i.e. any RPN number above 50 must be corrected, any thing below 50 is acceptable). For those of you who have created and worked with PFMEA's what number do you recommend? I am also willing to share non-proprietary portions of PFMEA's that I have developed with others if you will share with me (i.e. SMT placement, thru-hole, reflow, etc.) Ed Holton Hella Electronics [log in to unmask] ------------------------------ ################################################################ TechNet E-Mail Forum provided as a free service by IPC using LISTSERV 1.8c ################################################################ To subscribe/unsubscribe, send a message to [log in to unmask] with following text in the body: To subscribe: SUBSCRIBE TechNet <your full name> To unsubscribe: SIGNOFF TechNet ################################################################ Please visit IPC web site (http://jefry.ipc.org/forum.htm) for additional information. For the technical support contact Dmitriy Sklyar at [log in to unmask] or 847-509-9700 ext.311 ################################################################