A hybrid FMEA-TOPSIS method for risk management, case study: Esfahan Mobarakeh Steel Company

Abstract

Risk management is an inevitable way for an organisation to survive in such a competitive market. Big industries are exposed of so many modes of failure in their production processes that it makes difficult and baffling for a manager to decide which modes are of high priorities to diminish or prevent. Methods like FMEA can provide a way but not guarantee good results, because of high dependency on perception of the experts at the moment of evaluating the risks. The main objective of this paper is to eliminate the effects sentimentality and it presents a new method of FMEA to evaluate the risks of an organisation, in which TOPSIS help the method assess both the severity of the effects and the detection possibility of the failure modes with very low error. The method has been successfully implemented in a large Iranian company-Esfahan Mobarakeh Steel Company-before. The results show the most important risk among 645 failure modes in 21 production lines, only in one of the five industrial regions, is the adherence of box in box annealing line.