Improvement of the welding process of refrigeration circuit for domestic appliances: Haier Europe’s case study

The thesis “Improvement of the welding process of refrigeration circuit for domes-tic appliances: Haier Europe’s case study” has been developed during my entire internship period in the headquarter of Haier Europe, based in Brugherio (Milan). The activities developed during the internship period as a quality data analyst in the Cooling business sector, can be summarized according to these activities: the acquisition of raw data and the subsequent cleaning of them for the realization of a reliable analysis of the quality trend for all refrigeration products. The headquarter environment is very dynamic, where the business of all the mar-ket are managed and monitored, particularly in the Haier Europe organization, where all the activities carried out by all the business sectors are driven by an unique focus: the customer satisfaction. The data analyst is the first gate that is able to get the first feedback from the market. After the cleaning of the raw data, it’s clearer what are the most defective structures and especially what kind of problem presents after being sold to the final consumers. Hereafter, once is discovered an intrusive defects or problem, or maybe an unex-pected quality trend for a new structure, it will be presented to the other team member of the quality team, the NPI cooling quality specialist, who will start an action plan to recover the bad quality of the product and find out how to resolve it, joining effort with the R&D department if the problem is a design matter. This type of operation is very important, especially for monitoring the performanc-es of the new plant, Haier Tech s.r.l. just built in Romania, with the SOP (Start of Production) in summer 2021. Furthermore, I had the opportunity to better understand the role of a quality team member joining the task force, which I developed the thesis, which goal is to im-prove the Welding Process of a specific supplier of OEM refrigerator (Original Equipment Manufacturer). The objective of the thesis is to analyze the welding procedure of a refrigeration circuit and to understand which action plan initiate to improve the welding pro-cess of a specific supplier which has a failure rate of 73% higher with respect to the benchmark (obviously concerning leakages of the refrigeration circuit).