Automotive Customer Quality Problem

Our Wire forming facilities tier 2 automotive customer was having quality problems with a supplier that was manufacturing a safety related wire form. Our manufacturing team put together a cross functional team from Engineering, Quality and Sales to meet with the customer.  After the meeting we learned the customer was having an 18% fallout of bad parts from the current supplier. It was determined that the majority of the fallout was occurring after the heat treating process. We also found out this same problem was occurring with other parts numbers that all had similar applications for wire forms that were required under the hood of the automobile.

Following the meeting our manufacturing team accepted the challenge of trying to reduce the fallout and improve the quality problem. Our four-slide machines would be used for the production quantities but first we needed to try and solve the problem prior to hard tooling the parts. We used our low volume CNC wire benders to do a capability study to determine how the parts were moving. Test parts were made and sent through the heat treat process.

Once we understood how the material was moving during heat treatment; We recommended that our customer build new hard tooling for our four slide machines and provided piece part pricing for each part number involved. Our piece part price was competitive but the true savings came in the dramatic reduction in rejects from 18% to 3%. Production tooling was designed and built to accommodate the material movement during heat treat. Our capability study was correct and we had just over a 3% fall out in the customers application. The improved quality resulted in a 14% cost reduction to our customer, much less down time and they met their Tier one customers delivery and quality requirements.