Built by an engineer who has built real DFMEAs.
RiskForge exists because a DFMEA is only as good as the people who were in the room, and fewer teams have the people they used to. On paper the method is simple: list the functions, ask how each one can fail, score the risk. Doing it well across every part, every interface and every condition of use takes expertise, experience, process maturity and more time than most teams can put in the room.
Start from the science, not the checklist.
Every failure mode is worked out from the product in front of us: its materials, its geometry and the conditions it will actually see. Checklists and lessons-learned lists check the work afterward. They never decide what gets looked at.
After a field failure, the usual fix is one more line on your lessons-learned list. That catches the same failure on your next product. It does nothing for the next failure, because that one isn't on any list yet. Starting from the science is how you find it before it's on a list.
Brian Smallwood
Founder
Brian has spent 30 years developing and launching innovative products, dozens of them across several industries, and improving the processes that bring them to market. He's designed one-of-a-kind, multimillion-dollar pressure vessels for the steel industry; launched high-complexity electromechanical automotive systems; and led development of consumer, commercial and medical products. He holds a BS and MS in mechanical engineering from Carnegie Mellon, where his research was in non-linear fracture mechanics, fatigue and stress analysis.
DFMEA in multiple settings:
- Chrysler.Highly detailed DFMEAs inside a mature, long-established automotive process in a safety-critical, regulated environment.
- Newell Brands.Trained engineers across multiple business units and industries on DFMEA methodology as Director of R&D.
- Rubbermaid Healthcare.Introduced and applied ISO 14971, Application of risk management to medical devices, to a new business division.
As a Six Sigma Master Black Belt, he led Newell's corporate Six Sigma program and trained more than 200 Green, Black and Master Black Belts.
That background is why he treats the way a DFMEA gets made as a process in its own right, with failure modes of its own. Teams run FMEAs on their products; almost nobody runs one on the risk process that produces them. RiskForge is built that way: its own analysis is checked and improved like any other process.
RiskForge started from a familiar observation: the failure that reaches the field was usually knowable from the science, but nobody in the review asked the question that would have found it. It exists to bring the depth of a mature DFMEA process to teams that don't have one behind them.
Want to see it on your product?
We're enrolling a small number of pilot partners.