Quantitative analysis and assessment of intrinsic and extrinsic factors in human-in-the-loop incidents and prevalent early failures

Comprehensive analyses of complex human-in-the-loop (HITL)-equipment incidents and early failures (EF) are critical for prevention of safety problems. Traditional methods often overestimate extrinsic late-life causes, overlook and/or misattribute prevalent EF causing high losses and missing vital opportunities. Instrumentation-based systemic early failure analysis (SEFA) methodology provides comprehensive assessments of human-technical-mixed root causes and interactions. It also sorts few fundamental intrinsic causes and numerous trivial extrinsic ones using physics and subject-matter specifics (Juran-F10 principle). A typical industry-new EF of micro-wire-wound resistors supported by similar cross-industry errors illustrate the issues proving inherent deficiency of conventional approaches. These urge to restore enhanced modernised SEFA-centred closed feedback loop. The proposed SEFA-based semi-quantitative expert weight assessment better characterises multifaceted HITL incidents-EF vs. the conventional qualitative common-special causes. SEFA has demonstrated concurrent multifaceted improvements and high customer satisfaction for all tiers of modern HITL electronics.