Quality engineers who moved FMEAs off Excel — was the software actually better, or just more expensive?
Honesty up front: I'm not a quality engineer. I'm digging into the FMEA tooling space because the gap between "just use Excel" and "buy expensive enterprise software" looks real to me — and before I form strong opinions I'd rather hear it from people who actually live it.
Here's what I think I'm seeing from the outside — tell me where I'm wrong:
- Excel is free and universal, but seems to fall apart on version control, linking failure modes to the control plan, and the whole thing ends up living in one moderator's head.
- The dedicated tools (Teamcenter, IQ-RM / IQ-Software, Plato e1ns) clearly do more, but the license cost looks brutal for a smaller supplier and the learning curve looks steep enough that you need someone whose whole job is driving the tool.
For those of you who've actually made the jump:
- What finally pushed you off Excel — an audit finding, leadership, scale, something else?
- Did the software actually fix the version / knowledge-in-one-head problem, or did it just move it somewhere new?
- If you could go back, would you make the same call?
Not selling anything — genuinely trying to understand the reality before I build on assumptions.