CMMS with FMEA and correct RPN math.
SMMS (Smart Maintenance Management System) is a CMMS with tenant-configurable FMEA: documented 1-10 Severity/Occurrence/Detection anchor scales, a computed Risk Priority Number, and database-enforced risk-band integrity — so a misconfigured threshold can't silently corrupt every risk rating built on top of it.
What is FMEA / RPN?
Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) is a structured method for ranking failure risk before a failure happens, so maintenance effort goes where it matters most. Each potential failure mode on an asset is scored on three dimensions — Severity, Occurrence, and Detection — each 1 to 10, and multiplied together into a Risk Priority Number (RPN = S × O × D, range 1-1000). The highest-RPN failure modes are the ones worth a preventive task, a design change, or a spare-parts stocking decision; low-RPN modes can reasonably wait.
The three dimensions, and the one everyone gets backwards
Severity (S)
How bad is the consequence if this failure occurs? 1 = negligible, 10 = safety/regulatory hazard. Higher is worse.
Occurrence (O)
How often does this failure mode happen? 1 = roughly 1 in 100,000, 9-10 = roughly 1 in 10-20. Higher is worse.
Detection (D)
How likely are you to catch it before it causes the consequence? 1 = near-certain automated detection, 7+ = unlikely to detect before failure. Higher is WORSE — a common point of confusion competitors’ marketing pages get backwards.
How SMMS enforces RPN band integrity
Your Low/Medium/High/Critical risk bands are configurable per tenant — but the ordering between them is a database-level guarantee, not just a UI validation. A CHECK constraint requires low < medium < high <= 1000 at the schema level, so a bad configuration (say, a "high" threshold entered below "medium") is rejected by the database itself rather than silently producing a risk report where "high risk" items sort below "medium risk" ones.
Tenant configurability
A food-and-beverage plant and a fleet maintenance operation don't agree on what counts as a "high" risk failure — so each SMMS tenant sets its own S/O/D anchor scale language and its own RPN band thresholds, rather than inheriting one one-size-fits-all rubric. The math (RPN = S × O × D, correct detection semantics) is consistent across tenants; the thresholds that turn a number into a Low/Medium/High label are yours to set.
How FMEA connects to RCFA and PM strategy
A high-RPN failure mode is a candidate for a new or adjusted PM task — FMEA worksheets integrate with your PM templates so the highest-risk failure modes on an asset can drive what preventive work actually gets scheduled, instead of living in a separate spreadsheet nobody re-reads after the workshop that produced it. And when a root cause investigation finds that a failure happened more often, or was harder to detect, than your FMEA assumed, that's the signal to revisit the Occurrence or Detection score — FMEA and RCFA are meant to correct each other over time, not run once and never be touched again.
Limitations
- There is no automated FMEA generation — scoring Severity, Occurrence, and Detection for a failure mode is a human engineering judgment SMMS structures and enforces, not one it makes for you.
- No bundled FMEA template library ships beyond seeded demo rows — the "template" integration that exists is with PM templates (linking a failure mode to a preventive task), not a catalog of pre-written, industry-specific FMEA worksheets.
Frequently asked questions
Does SMMS support FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis)?
Yes. SMMS includes an FMEA module with Severity/Occurrence/Detection (S/O/D) scoring on documented 1-10 anchor scales, a computed Risk Priority Number (RPN = S × O × D), and tenant-configurable risk bands enforced by database CHECK constraints.
How does SMMS calculate RPN?
RPN is the product of Severity, Occurrence, and Detection scores (S × O × D), each scored 1-10, giving a range of 1-1000. SMMS computes this automatically once all three scores are entered on a failure mode line.
Is a higher Detection score better or worse?
Worse — this is the detail competitors’ marketing pages frequently get backwards. A LOW Detection score means you would almost certainly catch the failure before it causes harm (good); a HIGH Detection score means it would likely go unnoticed until it’s too late (bad). SMMS’s scoring UI and RPN math both use the correct, lower-is-better-for-detection semantics.
Can I set my own risk bands, or is Low/Medium/High/Critical fixed?
You set your own thresholds. Each tenant configures its own low/medium/high RPN band boundaries; the database enforces low < medium < high <= 1000 as a hard constraint so a misconfigured band ordering cannot silently corrupt every risk rating built on top of it. Anything above your high threshold is Critical.
Does SMMS ship a library of pre-built FMEA templates?
No standalone FMEA template library ships beyond seeded demo rows. What is real: FMEA worksheets integrate with your PM templates, so risk analysis and preventive-maintenance planning reference the same asset and failure-mode data rather than living in separate spreadsheets.
How does FMEA connect to RCFA?
They inform each other. FMEA scores risk on paper, before a failure occurs; RCFA investigates what actually happened after one does. A completed RCFA’s findings are the reality check an FMEA’s Occurrence and Detection assumptions should be updated against.
See the full reliability chain
Score risk with math your team can trust.
Request a demo and we'll walk through FMEA scoring on a tenant shaped like your fleet — or take the free RMI QuickScan first to see where your reliability program stands today.