Reliability assessment of a manual-based procedure towards learning curve modeling and fmea analysis

Abstract

Separation procedures in drug Distribution Centers (DC) are manual-based activities prone to failures such as shipping exchanged, expired or broken drugs to the customer. Two interventions seem as promising in improving the reliability in the separation procedure: (i) selection and allocation of appropriate operators to the procedure, and (ii) analysis of potential failure modes incurred by selected operators. This article integrates Learning Curves (LC) and FMEA (Failure Mode and Effect Analysis) aimed at reducing the occurrence of failures in the manual separation of a drug DC. LCs parameters enable generating an index to identify the recommended operators to perform the procedures. The FMEA is then applied to the separation procedure carried out by the selected operators in order to identify failure modes. It also deployed the traditional FMEA severity index into two sub-indexes related to financial issues and damage to company´s image in order to characterize failures severity. When applied to a drug DC, the proposed method significantly reduced the frequency and severity of failures in the separation procedure.

Keywords

• Curvas de aprendizado. FMEA. Centros de distribuição. Medicamentos.