3. Identify the potentially critical functions, components and manufacturing processes of your new product/system/component

To ensure the safety and reliability of your new product, you need to analyze the risks associated with its functions, components and manufacturing processes. These analyses are often tedious and costly tasks. You therefore need to focus your design activities on innovative and therefore potentially critical items. Before starting this step, we need to define the notion of criticality.

A function, product/system/component or manufacturing process is said to be critical if :

• In the event of its failure, the effect on the customer is considered severe. Use the following grid to assess the severity of the effect on the customer: