What’s new in Block3 FMEA

Changes to the app, newest first.

1 September 2026

AS9145 added, and the standard list narrowed to the ones that require an FMEA

AS9145 is now the aerospace choice. It is the standard that actually requires the DFMEA, the PFMEA and the control plan and ties them to each other and to first article. Drafting under it reaches for the three documents telling one story, key characteristics carried down from the drawing, every operation on the process flow accounted for, and first article after any change of design, source, method, tooling or location.
AIAG-VDA FMEA is now a choice of its own. The method itself: the failure chain stated at three levels, causes drawn from the 4M categories, prevention kept distinct from detection, and actions written so they can be closed.
AS9100 and IATF 16949 stay, because those are the quality systems named on a purchase order.
ISO 9001, ISO 14001, ISO 45001 and API Q1 have been removed. None of them specifies an FMEA, and drafting to a lens the standard does not ask for produced documents no FMEA reviewer recognised. You can still type any standard into Other, where the name is used and nothing is claimed on its behalf. Work you already have keeps the standard it was drafted under.

1 September 2026

Use a process more than once, and rate it on the FMEA

The same process can now sit in an FMEA more than once. A routing that inspects at OP20 and again at OP100 adds the same library process twice. Tick it in the picker again and it comes in as a second step.
Each placement gets its own title on the form. Leave it blank to use the library name, or set it so the two are tellable apart in the export. Only that FMEA sees the title, and both placements stay tied to the one analysis in your library, so a fix made there still reaches both.
Severity, Occurrence and Detection are now set on the FMEA. They used to be locked to the library, which meant a new part and a mature one scored the same. They belong to the part, so that is where they live. A rating in the library still comes across as the starting point.
Your ratings survive a library update. When a process is corrected in the library, the change reaches every FMEA using it and your ratings stay put, as long as the row they belong to is still there. Where a requirement, failure mode or cause has been rewritten, that row comes back unrated rather than carrying a score that was assigned to something else.
The classification review panel now groups similar requirements into one entry instead of listing every pair, so a long routing gets one line to read rather than dozens.

31 August 2026

Drafts are checked against your standard, point by point

Your standard is now answered for, not just mentioned. Picking AS9100 or IATF 16949 used to steer a draft in general terms. Every point that standard expects an analysis to cover is now put to each process on its own: does this bear on this operation, and if it does, is it already covered? Only a point that applies and is genuinely missing becomes a new requirement.
Points that don’t apply are left out. A kitting bench runs no special process and a deburring cell melts no material, and a draft that pretended otherwise would be padding. Nothing is added to a step the point doesn’t belong to, and no more than three requirements are added to any one step.
Older processes can be checked, free. Open any process drafted before this update and it shows the points its standard expects along with a single button to check them. The first check on each process costs no AI draft and works even if your drafts are used up, and it tells you plainly when nothing was missing.
Anything the check adds is held to the same rules as the rest of the draft: at least three failure modes, and causes that name a condition rather than a person.

31 August 2026

Better causes, and requirements that aren’t left short

Causes name a condition, not a person. Drafts no longer return “operator error”, “human error” or “inadequate training” as a cause. An auditor reads those as unfinished analysis, because the only action anyone can take against them is “retrain”. You now get the condition that let the mistake reach the part — a setup sheet that doesn’t state the value, a missing first-piece check, similar parts stored in unlabelled bins — which is something you can actually fix.
Short requirements are filled in automatically. A requirement that came back with only one or two failure modes is now topped up to three as part of drafting. Only short ones are touched, and only to three: a requirement that genuinely fails two ways stays at two.
Thin requirements are flagged on older work, and the repair is free. Your process library shows which processes have requirements under three failure modes, and opening one names them with a single button to fill them all in. Processes drafted before this update don’t change on their own, so the first Top up on each of them costs no AI draft and works even if your drafts are used up — a draft that came back short is ours to finish, not yours to pay for twice. Later top-ups on the same process count as one draft, and the button tells you which it is before you press it.
Your standard is shown before you commit to it. When you create an FMEA, every process in the picker now shows the standard it was drafted under, and the page states which standard the new document will be created under and where that came from. Picking an ISO 9001 process into an AS9100 document used to happen silently.
Add several processes at once. The picker inside an FMEA is now a ticklist with search and row counts, matching the one on the New FMEA screen, instead of adding one process at a time.
Special characteristics come back more reliably. Requirements on features that reach the customer or affect safety are designated Critical or Significant again, rather than a whole process arriving with nothing classified.

30 August 2026

FMEA Studio is now Block3 FMEA

New name, same app. “FMEA Studio” is also the name of an Excel add-in sold by another company, which made the product hard to find and easy to confuse with something it isn’t. Block3 is the failure mode, the 3 is Severity, Occurrence and Detection — the three ratings that multiply into the RPN.
Your account, documents and library are untouched. The old address still works and always will: every PDF you have already exported carries it in the footer.

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