Preventive and Proactive Quality Management in production - Occurrence and Release analysis of high performances electric powertrains production lines

Nowadays the automotive world is undergoing the most radical change since its birth and supercars make no exception. The increasingly strict regulations in terms of pollution require car manufacturers to make a paradigm change. The employment of internal combustion engines will decrease in the next years, being progressively substituted by electrified cars. In this context, FPT Industrial, acronym of Fiat Powertrain Technologies, has been chosen as supplier for two high performance electric powertrains. The high level of required performances and the premium nature of the manufacturer make quality crucial during the development and industrialization of these products. In such a context, this thesis project arises from an eight months internship in the plant quality office of the company, following the new electric powertrain industrialization, with the aim to carry out a preventive and proactive analysis on the new production lines, aimed to investigate all the possible quality countermeasures that may improve the process robustness, enabling to achieve the desired requirements. The first part of the work, after a brief introduction about the company, describes the World Class Manufacturing methodology and its basic principles. The second part investigates in more detail the Quality Control pillar, its main tools and different possible approaches. The following section illustrates the starting point of the analysis and describes theoretically the tool employed during the analysis. The central part of the project provides a description of data collection on the field, an overview of the two electric powertrains and of the practical application of the Occurrence and Release tool, with an extended analysis of the results. Finally, conclusions are drawn on the effectiveness of the applied tool and on the main difficulties experienced during the analysis of the over 200 operations that compose the production processes.