Re: The biggest gaps in QMS or quality in Automotive
QMS is a pretty broad swath to critique. But I will give it a shot.
I visit factories all over the globe and get to see how different regions do things differently.
The biggest weakness I see around the globe is the amassing of data and then not doing anything with it. There's lots of energy when something is a repeat issue, yet, there are lots of repeat issues. I haven't seen what I would call a good system for the proper handling of data and then the leveraging of this into a searchable resource to prevent repeat issues. I see lots and LOTS of different measurements being archived, and then not trended and analyzed. It's like everyone wants to know if records are being kept and if they are - just being kept - it's good. Nobody does much following up with are you DOING anything with all this data? Looking for trends and patterns? It's just not done. It's promoting a culture of reacting to quality problems. And the sense of "getting better" comes from experience in doing so. Once you have resolved 20 quality spills, you get good at it. This alone makes you faster/more efficient with the false sense things are getting "better." Better is the next launch/design, whatever, not carrying forward the mistakes. We don't do well at that.
Second would be just knowledge of quality topics. I used to be in a different industry than automotive. When I moved into automotive I was scared - it's the big leagues now - I was worried I would have to brush up on my statistics, concepts of the quality tools, everything. What I found was most people weren't at my level. And my "level" was pretty normal in the industry I left. Automotive has a lot more overhead positions - it's more compartmentalized. So my experience has been people have become more like tools than technicians. You have this kind of problem? You need to call THAT guy ... he's the expert. Different problem? You need to call a different expert.
