Podium Advanced Technologies Quality Plan Research for best practices and tools for the Podium Product Development Process optimization and implementation of the Quality activities in a Podium Project

The continuous research for performance, improvement and innovation are some of the key aspects of the Automotive domain and, even more, in the Motorsport environment. Those are some of the main peculiarities of Podium Advanced Technologies, a company that offers services in a high-performance automotive domain, covering conventional, hybrid and full electric vehicles and powertrains. This company is characterized by young passioned highly skilled engineers that led Podium to be nominated by Financial Times among Europe’s 1000 fastest growing companies for five consecutive years (from 2018 to 2022). Those characteristics and those awards, though, are not enough to be considered as a fully reliable and trustable company; in the last years many Car Makers (especially large OEMs) are asking more and more often evidences for the goodness of the work done inside the company. One of the most frequent requests by the Car Makers is the compliance to regulations and norms related to the Automotive Industrial Application that certify and guarantee the Quality of the designed and produced products. Even if Podium still works at prototypal level and not yet at the Industrial one, the customers Podium works for are more and more often OEMs, like AUDI. This means that, soon or later, possible certifications compliance could be asked and, right now, Podium wouldn’t be structured enough for getting them. The goal of this paper, so, is to create a Quality Plan which contains a set of activities, standards, procedures, and documents to be implemented with the aim of helping the company to take a clear direction in the reduction of the gap with respect to the norms requirements and, even more importantly, to improve the Internal Product Development Process trying to toughen it up and make it more reliable without limiting the dynamicity and the flexibility of the company.