Vehicle safety is a critical requirement not only for protecting brand reputation but also to ensure the performance and safety of the vehicle to win customer loyalty. Ensuring the quality and consistency of automotive products requires a stringent quality management system encompassing quality control and quality assurance.
An effective quality control system ensures the following:
- Compliance: Ensuring compliance with applicable standards such as:
- IATF, focuses on continuous improvement, preventing defects, and reducing wastage
- AEC- Q 100 and 200 for testing stress of integrated circuits and passive components automotive applications, respectively
- Emission standards
- Safety
- Product Consistency: Standardizing manufacturing processes to ensure consistency across batches or production line.
- Low Cost of Manufacturing: Quality control minimizes wastage and improves resource utilization, thereby reducing the cost of manufacturing. Defects can be detected early, eliminating the need for repairs, recalls, or replacement of faulty parts.
- Improved Customer Delight: Any vehicle with good driving or traveling experiences contributes to customer delight. This helps build brand reputation, expand reach, and accelerate growth.
- Supplier Management: Quality control involves inspecting the raw materials and other suppliers from vendors and partners. Any quality lapse is detected early, and feedback is given to rectify the error or replace the supplier based on performance. This reduces the nonconformance of products at a later stage.
The Key Processes of Quality Control
Quality control involves 4 key processes. These are:
- Process control, where a process is fine-tuned for continuous improvement and monitoring to ensure the results are achieved.
- Acceptance sampling, where the quality team selects a sample from a batch to ensure it meets the quality requirements.
- The control chart is a visualization using graphs and charts to show process changes over time.
- Product quality control demonstrates conformance and compliance of the product to internal and external quality requirements.
Some of the key factors in quality control in the automotive industry include:
- Right Tools: The quality control team must be data-driven and needs tools and techniques to ensure the quality of processes and the end products. The quality control processes encompass the entire product development lifecycle from planning to design, development, production, verification, and improvement. Tools such as APQP, PPAP, FMEA, SPC, and MSA help measure the effectiveness of each of these processes.
- Periodic Inspection: The quality control team must conduct periodic inspections of the various sites to ensure the quality of processes, including the cleanliness of the premises, adherence to SOPs, and reporting of any deviations early. They must interview the workers on the shopfloor to gather inputs and, if necessary, recommend immediate action. The inspection report must be reviewed by the management and follow-up action taken. In the subsequent inspection, the effectiveness of the change must be recorded.
- Testing: This involves testing the components or the vehicle in field settings or laboratory conditions to verify whether the product performs as expected. Any deviations must be rectified before testing live and releasing in the market.
The Advanced Quality Control Techniques in the Automotive Industry
Continuous improvement of the quality management system is a requirement of most regulations and standards. To enable this, businesses are required to use a data-driven risk-based approach. The three advanced quality control techniques that help businesses identify risks and prevent their becoming quality issues include:
- Technique 1 - Failure Mode Analysis: This enables identifying risks of failure by analyzing the production process. Control measures can be implemented to mitigate those risks or minimize the impact.
- Technique 2 - Statistical Control: A commonly used technique across industries, this technique uses statistics to control and improve production processes.
- Technique 3 - Calibrating Measurement Instrument: Quality control uses equipment to measure and analyze products and ensure they are fit for release. This measuring equipment must be calibrated periodically to ensure the accuracy of the measurement and minimize variations between batches.
Automating the Quality Control Process
The supply chain has become globalized and the production and marketing processes are more complex. This has increased the complexity involved in quality control as well. Supplier management, standardization of processes, risk management, and change management can be challenging in such an environment, increasing the burden on the quality control team to ensure compliance and conformance across the sites.
Automating the quality control process can help make it more effective by providing visibility, traceability, and transparency of the processes. Some of the benefits of automating quality control include:
- Risk Management: Failure Mode Analysis data can be made available to all stakeholders in a centralized repository for timely action.
- Change Management: Whenever a change is proposed, a cloud-based quality control system can more effectively analyze the impact of the changes across workflows and rectify or revert based on observations and results.
- Monitoring and Tracking: Continuous improvement requires introducing incremental changes. In a manual system, it can be hard to understand the impact of the changes across functions. A cloud-based system makes monitoring and tracking progress and taking timely action easier.
- RCA and CAPA: Whenever an issue occurs, identifying the root cause is critical to taking appropriate action and preventing future recurrence. Automating RCA can improve the quality of investigation and the subsequent effectiveness of CAPA.
- Supplier: Integrating certain processes with the suppliers, sharing information and documents, and communicating and collaborating with vendors and partners becomes easier.
- Document: Quality management is all about documenting and recording for regulatory requirements and continuity. Automating processes minimizes the effort needed for documentation.
- Training: Identifying gaps and providing focused training to encourage employee participation in the quality management process will reduce issues and improve quality.
- Compliance: Automating and creating a quality culture increases employee engagement in proactive quality management, thereby improving compliance.
- Inspection: Inspection is a key quality control activity. Automating scheduling, facilitating remote inspection, documenting, communicating, and collaborating with other team members becomes easier.
- Review: The quality inspection and other control activities can be monitored, and the data can be made accessible to the management team for review and decision-making.
