Chysler Fires Quality Chief

[sptcoupe]

Looks like Sergio is moving to address the quality issues at Chrysler and FIAT after the second poor showing in Consumer Reports.

http://www.autoblog.com/2014/10/28/chry ... umer-repo/

[aj81spider]

Poor quality isn't the result of underperforming quality assurance departments, it's the result of poor designs and out of control manufacturing (control in the SPC sense).

That change isn't going to help their quality at all.

[RRoller123]

But it is QA's job to close the various feedback/communications loops, gather and analyze the data, and lead improvement teams in Mfg. I never had any use for QA who just issued inspection reports and then went for coffee. Not saying that is what happened here, but QC/QA has to be an integral, participating and contributing part of the organization or they get pooched.

[aj81spider]

I agree that a good QA department needs to do those things. However, in my experience if QA is getting the production data and determining whether the process is in control then it is not. Manufacturing needs to do that as part of standard every day operations management.

Too often QA is the patch for poor process control on the manufacturing floor, or worse - a poor design with hard to manufacture tolerancing.

True Story:

While in college I was an intern at a (now closed) division of a major American auto company. My job was to write a Monte Carlo statistical analysis program. When I was done my manager wanted me to test it by running the program on the layout of belts on an engine they were building that was getting a lot of complaints from dealers for excessive belt wear and belts being thrown. They wanted to run a Monte Carlo analysis on the tolerances to see if there was a stackup problem, and if there was to institute checks in the plant to discard parts that caused a bad stackup.

I created a model that referenced all the belt pulley's to the front of the block. Before I ran the simulation I ran the nominal case to make sure the program was set up correctly. After spending all morning trying to figure out my problem I realized that the pulleys were not aligned to the same plane when every dimension was at nominal. That caused quite a stir in the engine department!

You can fire a lot of heads of QA and never get at the source of that kind of problem.

[baltobernie]

I was in the LED industry for 25 years, and it was not uncommon to have the customer (unknowingly) determine product quality. Samples would burn your eyes out, but once on the AVL, production releases would deliberately come from declining intensity and hue bins until the customer squawked. Japanese, German or American suppliers; they all did it. Only when (if) the customer invested in photometric equipment and reported actual values back to the supplier did the problem go away.

[So Cal Mark]

with all of the 500 clutch failures, and Fiats refusal to acknowledge or address them, I'm glad the sob got canned.

[supplyguy]

Chrysler had a quality chief? Who knew!