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Automotive Customer (Quality)
A Tier 2 automotive customer was experiencing some quality concerns with an existing wire form supplier on automotive safety parts. As a result, a cross functional team meeting was scheduled that included Production, Tooling, Engineering, Sales & Quality.
Wire Products Company, an AS9100D / ISO9001:2015 registered manufacturer, reviewed the scope of the customer’s concerns and learned they were having an 18.0% fallout on bad parts. It was determined that most of the fallout was occurring after heat treating. Several parts were involved, but all similar applications under the hood of the automobile.
Wire Products Company accepted the challenge to reduce the fallout and improve the quality; four slide machines would be used for production quantities. A capability study was initiated using our low volume CNC wire benders. Test parts were made and sent to heat treating to learn about the material movement after heat treat.
Once the material movement was understood, Wire Products Company proposed a new hard tooling for four slide machines and quoted a piece-price for each part.
Wire Products Company’s piece-price was competitive, but the true savings would be appreciated by improving the quality of the parts and reducing the bad part fallout.
The capability study and part trials showed they could potentially reduce the fallout from 18.0% à 3.3%.
Production tooling was built that would compensate for the material movement at heat treating, and their capability study proved that the result was less than a 4% fallout on bad parts during production runs.
Improved quality resulted in 14% cost savings for the Tier 2 automotive customer, much less down time for their operations, and as an additional benefit they became an even better supplier to another automotive customer that is a Tier 1.
