Achieving world-class perceived vehicle quality through improved engineering and manufacturing tools

Throughout the vehicle development process, automotive manufacturers must work to meet a variety of customer needs. One increasingly important attribute is vehicle exterior perceived quality, which is largely dependent on how well exterior parts fit together. Before vehicles are produced and sold to customers, manufacturers utilize several processes and tools to "tune in" vehicle exteriors. This thesis examines one manufacturer's approach to delivering vehicle exterior quality, including a recent change initiative to improve the tune in process. The overall vehicle development process is introduced, and then detail is provided for areas of the process that relate closely to vehicle exteriors. Two areas that are explored in depth are the manufacturer's tune in build strategy and a new exterior fitting fixture implementation. An assessment of build strategy is provided and a framework is proposed. The framework is based on functional build theory and Key Characteristic (KC) chains. Functional build is a process to ensure that the vehicle exterior meets specifications while allowing engineering teams to determine the best way to solve dimensional problems, which may or may not include forcing a component in the assembly to design intent.

Department dc:contributor.department

Leaders for Manufacturing Program at MIT

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2005

Author dc:creator

• Glomski, Paul T

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Daniel Whitney and Jan Klein.

• Sloan School of Management.
• Mechanical Engineering.
• Leaders for Manufacturing Program.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/34838

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/34838