IATF 16949:2016 certification process within a company of construction, moulds and mechanical equipment: the case of CO.ST.AT. S.p.A.

This master thesis is written as a closing part to the Master Program in Management Engineering, path Production, at Politecnico di Torino. The project has been done in cooperation with CO.ST.AT, acronym for COstruzione STampi ATtrezzature (Construction, molds and equipment of mechanical parts), which is an industry located in Piobesi Torinese, in the Turin belt. CO.ST.AT. currently holds the ISO 9001: 2015, it aims to become ISO 9001: 2015 and IATF 16949: 2016 certified company as well. This work is part of this certification process and it has been partially developed in the framework of an internship has been carried out in the spring of 2021. The task consists of reviewing the quality system of the company in all its parts; modify what already existed and draw up new procedures where missing. The main reason for CO.ST.AT. to be certified is due to the need to better satisfy the large number of customers served, improve production and organizational performance and enter the market even better. The goal of the thesis work consisted in addressing all the steps to allow the company to obtain the IATF 16949: 2016 certification and implement its quality system. The processes of each department were analyzed in detail and subsequently represented in the form of a procedure through the use of flow charts. Subsequently, after defining the company organization chart and the job descriptions of the various departments, the skills matrix was updated in detail. In the latter, the skills of the people currently employed in CO.ST.AT. were assessed one by one. Thanks to this analysis, it was possible to identify the most deficient departments and consequently schedule courses and training in order to increase the qualifications of the staff. Another aspect on which we focused the work has been was the analysis and monitoring of the KPIs of the individual departments. One of these led the introduction of the MTBF and MTTR (Mean Time Between Failure & Mean Time To Rapair) indices with regard to the extraordinary maintenance of the machinery present in CO.ST.AT. For the introduction of these indicators, it was necessary to train the maintenance manager and implement his machinery monitoring system and data collection related to failure analysis. The final part of the work was aimed at controlling all organizational processes through the planning of internal audit dates which made it possible to evaluate the individual processes before the final audit with the external certification body. Following this, corrective actions were implemented for all the departments in which various more or less serious non-conformities were found. Such an activity has been extremely relevant for the whole project. The evaluation of the work done has made it possible to improve the whole related process in view of the final audit date.