The Research And Application Of Prototype Vehicle Quality Based On The Voice Of Customer Audit

Most of major international automakers don't have initial quality study system for vehicles made in prototype build phase now.Normally,they will refer to the standardized vehicle inspection process and the product audit process the same as they are conducting for formal products everyday.For example,Shanghai GM has the global customer audit for prototype vehicle;Ford China has the ford customer audit for prototype vehicle.What they are focusing now is to summarize the score according to the different issue category they found,and then get the average score based on the vehicle number.So that they can evaluate what's the quality status they are making.There's no priority for the same level issues.All the issues are put into the same deck and the launch manager will lead the quality improvement for new programs.In the prototype shop,the process is ex-factory inspection standard will be used for conducting the audit.There's no real customer concern will be added into the audit in that build phase.How to evaluate the actual quality status for the prototype vehicle is a significant topic.The evaluation result in prototype can help management team recognize the launch quality risk as early as possible.If we can expose the issues and sort them according to the weights,so that team can recognize the issues and make containment actions.Then we can improve the launch quality at the beginning of launch,also we can avoid the quality risk in the future.Voice of Customer Fleet process is a quality evaluation happened in Ford plant.It is a standardized Ford procedure which we are using on new model products which are short run production.The result can represent real customer's concern.Concerning the problem of inaccurate evaluation result we are facing during the prototype build in Ford China,this thesis formulates the product quality level evaluation index system based on voice of customer fleet process,divides the vehicle audit event into 8 level-1 and 15 level-2 indicators according to issue type,and introduces the evaluation content and the ranking of each index,then use AHP to caculate the weight of each index,and the membership degree subset of each index factor comes from the expert questionnaire form;Finally we create the product quality defect ranking evaluation model based on the result of audit,determines the scope of quality grading assessment.This new evaluation process is practical and suitable for Ford China.The final result of the vehicle audit is combined the quantitative issue score with qualitative quality ranking,which is not only beneficial for the leadership to setup quality targets in accordance with the score of audit,but also can show the level of the vehicle quality during prototype build.At last,we will use the evaluation index system to evaluate two programs which are running in Prototype plant now to validate the process' s feasibility and practicability,ensure the system can help us evaluate the quality level objectively in Ford Prototype build.