Initialisation of a quality initiative in the driving dynamics development segment of a leading premium automotive manufacturer.
Background
Quality and reliability play a significant role along the entire value-adding chain. This is based on the OEM’s transfer of development and production responsibility to the suppliers, which applies to the automotive industry in particular. The increase in significance is mostly due to the implemented change in structure caused by emerging major module and system suppliers, increased product complexity, high cost pressure, an increasing number of innovation fields and elevated quality demands from the end customer. The main focus of automotive manufacturers is still on customer orientation. Instead of accepting expensive inspections to achieve quality targets, the new motto is “error prevention”.
The specific task
- To identify procedural and organisational error drivers
- To initialise and economically evaluate product quality increasing measures
- To anchor target achievement in Management’s Balanced Scorecard
KBC Solution approach
In the conflicting field between reaction and prevention, the quality work in our client’s driving dynamics segment was at that stage strongly focussed on troubleshooting. However, the focus of the programme to be implemented was on greater prevention in order to considerably increase performance in development. Thanks to our long-term experience in the automotive industry’s development segment, we were able to systematically analyse the most important needs for action and their causes in cooperation with our client’s programme management. As drivers in the content-related initialisation and economic evaluation (cost/benefit) of the individual measures, we were quickly able to assure our client of the confirmation of programme contents and measures by top management.
Realisation of potential
In common dialogue with our client, we were able to develop the key action fields Market Orientation, Quality, Process Chain Networking and Preventative Measures. Quality work in our client’s key technical areas can be sustainably improved in the future with 15 contextually aligned enabler measures in the three fields of action, evaluated and coordinated with Business Cases. Processes and measures for the initialisation and implementation of measures, previously tried and tested by KBC in other initiatives, were also successfully implemented in the development segment for a Q programme.