This book is intended for small business owners and non-engineers such as researchers, business analysts, project managers, small non-profits, community groups, religious organizations, and others who want an assessment tool that can provide methods for:

- identifying the areas or actions that may be at risk for failure
- ranking the risks that they may be facing, and
- determining the degree of threat being faced.

While an FMEA is a tool of reliability engineering, this book sidesteps the complex approach that reliability engineering can take; therefore, it does not cover all aspects and applications of an FMEA.

This book provides sufficient information about FMEAs, without requiring the expertise of an engineer or statistical analyst, to establish specifications and for making cost-effective, informed decisions.

FMEAs are valuable for:

- developing policies and standard operating procedures (SOPs)
- developing system, design, and process requirements that eliminate or minimize the likelihood of failures
- developing designs, methods, and test systems to ensure that errors or failures are automatically corrected, errors or failures are flagged for correction, the potential for errors or failures have been eliminated, or risks are reduced to acceptable levels
- developing and evaluating of diagnostic systems, and
- helping with design choices (trade-off analysis)