Seeking Support
To meet the growing expectations of OEMs and live up to its own zero-defect strategy, Magna Powertrain set a goal in 2015 to further tighten its quality targets. As part of this effort, a quality initiative was launched to permanently reduce warranty costs, minimize quality issues experienced by OEMs, and reduce scrap resulting from quality defects in production.
“We were looking for an external partner who could help us work with an international team to define measures within a few days that would enable the company to achieve our quality goals in 2020,” says Joachim Schuster, Senior Manager of Quality Engineering at Magna Powertrain.
When Employees Are Involved from the Start
The defined measures should also be evaluated in terms of their impact, a roadmap should be drawn up, and a change and communication plan should be established. Since the participants—who came from the Quality, Development, and Production departments at various locations—had never worked together in this configuration before, the challenge also lay in forming an internationally operating team. 3DSE’s approach was therefore based on a behavior-oriented, emergent approach to engage employees from the outset and transform them into a self-directed team. The starting point for defining measures for the quality initiative was an analysis of success factors, as well as an analysis of existing problems and risks. This analysis also served as a reference for quantitatively evaluating the impact of the measures. In work cells, the necessary measures were then defined and detailed, drawing on the knowledge of success factors and existing risks and problems. These measures—relating to process, product, and organization—were then quantitatively evaluated in terms of their impact on the quality objectives. Based on this, concrete action plans were put together, assigned to responsible parties, and made ready for implementation starting the very next day.
“The result of just a few days of intensive collaboration was the launch of a global quality initiative with a clear understanding of the current state of quality and the steps needed to achieve our goals. The measures we developed remain highly relevant to our quality efforts even today.”
