The Six Sigma Quality Improvement At K Automotive Glass Company

With rapid economic globalization progress, the government-owned, private and foreigner-owned enterprises, China-foreign joint-ventures are more and more involved in. As one of the leading consuming industry, automotive industry is now the target of more and more enterprises. For an enterprise, improving product quality is critical to gain customer satisfaction, reduce manufacturing/warranty cost and finally improve market competition. However, the quality capabilities of current domestic automotive suppliers are not satisfying. During the supplying to automotive assembly plants, many quality issues have occurred. They have become the weakest part of global supply base. The quality tools being used are often isolated traditional tools like brainstorming, fishbone,8 step, etc., lacking of systematic tool for analysis and problem solving, or systematical quality tools for management and improvement.The content of this paper is the quality improvement at K automotive glass company for the most serious and urgent problem, to reduce the scrape rate of windshield optical distortion.The paper introduces K company and problem of its quality system at first. Then, the paper analyzes the windshield distortion problem and set reduction of optical distortion as lean six sigma improvement objective. After the definition phase of the improvement project, MSA is used to confirm the repeatability and reproducibility of the measurement system, followed by measurement of current optical distortion condition to know the baseline. Based on the measurement result, brain storming is performed to collect the possible root causes. For different types of root causes, Kaizan,5S and DOE experiments are designed for improvements. After all corrective actions have been implemented, the scrape rate of windshield optical distortion are reduced from 2.5% to 0.25%, which is beyond 1% project target.The paper researches the application of Six Sigma for quality improvement. The optimized Six Sigma DMAIC framework will provide guidelines and reference for application of Six Sigma management in quality improvement. Therefore, the methodology and system management can be used as theoretical base and good example for other Six Sigma programs for quality improvement. The quality level of this enterprise can be improved by the Plan-Do-Check-Analysis quality cycle. It also provides other enterprises the reference to improve quality and implement Six Sigma management.