Improvement of coordination system for product development process in automotive tire industry

Abstract

This thesis was aimed to improve coordinating system of OE Technical Service (TS) department of an automotive tire manufacturer in Thailand. New product development process of TS department was studied in order to analyze and prevent root causes of existing problems and potential problem in the future. The analysis and improvement in this thesis applied various concepts and tools in quality improvement, such as process flowchart, Poka-Yoke, zero defect concept, Pareto chart, fishbone diagram, why-why technique, and FMEA. Some framework in automotive industry, such as APQP and AIAG’s manual, were also applied. From the application of the mentioned tools, this thesis improved process flowchart and created new documents of TS department to reduce problems occurrence and increase error detectability. This improvement was implemented to product development projects of the case company, and the result showed that this improvement helped the case company to eliminate the problems. Besides, this thesis provided suggestions to TS department for potential failures prevention with priority of potential problems.