Powering Performance

AIAG has expanded its partnership with VDA, Germany’s automotive quality standards and guidelines organization. New in the AIAG line-up is training designed to develop personnel to conduct VDA’s Automotive SPICE® assessment.

The new chair of AIAG’s Quality Steering Committee, Jim Pastor, has some specific ideas of where he’d like to see the committee focus its efforts in 2017. After eight years with Johnson Controls in positions ranging from global director of quality — GM Business Unit to group vice president — automotive quality, Pastor recently transitioned to the role as vice president — quality for the new Johnson Controls spinoff, Adient. With global responsibility for all of Adient’s manufacturing sites, including complete seat and components, Pastor is in a perfect position to lead AIAG’s quality initiatives on behalf of the industry.

As one of AIAG’s recently appointed board members, Vince Mastrangelo, vice president, quality, North America region for Continental North America, will focus on increasing awareness of AIAG’s training, guidelines, and best-practice processes across the industry.

As one of AIAG’s recently appointed board members, Debra Poppas, vice president, global quality for PACCAR, plans to help AIAG better serve the commercial vehicle industry and work to improve overall supplier processes. More than 20 executives from the automotive and transportation OEM and supplier community currently serve on the AIAG board, representing a cross-section of its member companies.

As one of AIAG’s recently appointed board members, Dr. Jeffrey Richards, global director production control, logistics, and supplier quality for Delphi, says he will work on developing standards to improve the quality and performance of supply chain processes.

You have a great management staff committed to the highest quality standards, but September 2018 isn’t that far away. Is everyone on your team ready for the IATF 16949 transition?

If not, we can help.

AIAG is offering a free tool to help suppliers transition to IATF 16949. The tool can be used to perform an organizational gap analysis against IATF 16949 to identify differences that need to be addressed to ensure the supplier’s quality management system meets all the new requirements.

Quality issues in the field need to be identified and resolved quickly, to contain costs and also to maintain end-consumer satisfaction. Data-driven techniques are the most effective and efficient means to identify such issues rapidly because they provide an inexpensive, centralized solution, without the need to ship physical parts or have analysts travel. Quality issues may be found and tracked semi-automatically by setting up and interpreting appropriate alerts. Early notifications involve inherently complex methods to avoid false alarms while not missing important real issues. With experience and experimentation, combined with the means to set alerts on diverse data sources, useful early quality alerts are feasible.

Introduction to Automotive Warranty Training
This is an introductory course designed to give the attendee a basic understanding of warranty, warranty-related terminology, and how warranty applies to the automotive industry and the supply chain.

System-level problems are often indicated in repairs with replaced components, with failed parts tested showing No Trouble Found. Some aspects of this difficult and widespread problem are caused by system-level failures due to unexpected interactions among elements of the system (rather than component-level issues). We examine this NTF issue by the automated analysis or mining of repair and maintenance data generated by automotive service technicians.