Towards Overcoming the Boundaries between Manufacturing and Perceived Quality: An Example of Automotive Industry

Abstract

Automotive manufacturing enterprises face many challenges today. Remaining as one of the biggest among them is delivering value to the customers through product quality. Moreover, good manufacturing or technical quality does not always result in high perceived quality from a customer perspective. At the same time, perceived quality is a property that has to be incorporated into the product during the whole product lifecycle, from design to production. Throughout the production stage, every manufacturing operation contributes to the building of final product's perceived quality. Thus, there is a need to control manufacturing operations related to this matter. This paper addresses the connection of the perceived quality framework, which defines dimensions of the perceived quality, to a manufacturing model that represents the manufacturing variation and propagation during different assembly operations. The aim of the study is to overcome boundaries between manufacturing and perceived quality. An industrial example, within the automotive premium sector, has been used to draw this connection illustrating the case of welded assemblies.