Every failure can be put down to a human mistake. This fact gains, especially if a person is responsible for the quality of a product or service, importance. The FMEA is mainly used in the industrial sector to judge technical risks and develop risk reduction measures. In order to consider the human factor in the FMEA, human action and the interaction of each influence on the human work-potential must first be taken into account. On the basis of this information human action failures can be identified and judged as cause of a product-fault, which allows to allocate a priority to an error. It is impossible to speak of a clear correlation between cause and effect on the individual level of a person, rather is a network of different influence factors responsible for the human work-potential. This potential is converted into performance characteristics in the company, which influence the probability of action failures. The enterprise has to accept the natural barrier of privacy of its employees. It can try to motivate them or refer to a deplorable state of affairs, but may never blame them for their mistakes. A company should rather focus on enterprise specific factors and try to create a comfortable and performance-enhancing environment, which, due to security and control barriers, stands out with a low proneness to errors. Furthermore are a constructive fault culture and mutual trust additional key factors on this level.

The Human-FMEA can be used both, reactively, by identifying and correcting already happened mistakes, and proactively, by examining possible faults. The proactive way offers the opportunity to examine an early analysis of the human factor, therefore a chance to prevent errors exists. To take adequate measures to improve enterprise-specific factors occurs also in this phase of action. Measures concerning staff directly are highly employee-dependent and can be traced by either preventive interviews, trainings and examinations or reactive ways.