The influence of the maturation status of components on their approval in new product design

Abstract

Nowadays, companies aiming to survive in the automotive industry must reinvent themselves by investing in technological innovation and addressing the all-important product quality. This work focuses on the industrialization phase of externally purchased parts, more specifically on the development and construction of manufacturing methods and associated controls. Most methodologies on the market today do not focus on the negative points resulting from both feasibility analyses and simulation studies, such as delays and lack of proper maturation for start of series production, highlighting the need to further advance process efficiency by using continuous quality improvement tools. A simulation of a manufacturing process in an automotive environment using a Petri netbased simulation model was used. Results show that for a generic Production Part Approval Process (PPAP) model there is a delay of 47-77 weeks in project maturation that can compromise a robust start of series production on the client. The main objective of this work is to show that is possible to increase both the feasibility and robustness of the manufacturing process without delays when the project management considers a stronger supplier’s involvement in the design development phase and by applying more focused Advanced Product Quality Planning (APQP) and Quality Gates (QG) on monitoring the project evolution at suppliers and organizations. Further studies should be carried out to evaluate the impact of other variables such as introducing a wider variability to the maturation phase as well as other impacting variables.