NEWS

Making continuous quality improvements in your automotive manufacturing ensures the consistency of the products your customers receive. It also helps you comply with industry-specific standards to elevate the safety of your vehicles. This reduces the number of defective parts that could lead to vehicle recalls or accidents.

These are reasons to continuously make improvements in your automotive manufacturing. The following suggestions can help.

Implement these tips to make continuous improvements in your automotive manufacturing.

Promote a Mindset of Quality and Efficiency

Everyone on your team needs to focus on increasing quality and efficiency in your automotive manufacturing. You can gather different perspectives from many functional areas. It also helps you understand the history of the process. Understanding how the process became what it is helps you discover opportunities for improvement.

Focus on Increasing Customer Value

Understand the types of improvements customers are looking for to increase the value of a vehicle. Customers should be more willing to pay a higher cost for a vehicle if they feel the additional features or functions are worth it.  

Understand the Cost of Quality

The cost to recall and fix a product defect after it reaches the customer is significantly greater than the cost to resolve the issue before the product is made. This is why your team needs to understand the costs of warranty repair or replacement and the company’s damaged reputation. Your team needs to uncover and resolve the root of product issues before the products are placed in vehicles.

Solve Problems

Discover the root cause of defects in the manufacturing process. You may want to continually ask why something happened until you find the true source of the issue. After the problem is solved, run tests to verify the issue is resolved. This minimizes the need for additional quality inspection steps or rework stations.

Practice Process Discipline

Follow process discipline as much as possible throughout your quality improvement process. When you need to deviate from your standard work, talk with your team to anticipate the potential impact on your product quality. Also, thoroughly record how the product is produced. This helps you find the root cause of any issues that may arise. Plus, educate your team on the new best practices to be used going forward.

Implement Improvement Management Technology

Use continuous improvement software to set, communicate, follow, and improve the data and institutional knowledge for your standard work. This helps your team manage projects, improve efficiency, reduce waste, and measure the impact of change. The results are more data-based business decisions and an improved bottom line.

Do you need support resources?

Sustained Quality provides support resources focusing on quality containment and customized solutions for quality control challenges. Reach out to us today.