DEVELOPMENT OF A QUALITY MANAGEMENT MODEL IN THE AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY WITH A FOCUS ON THE QUALITY OF INCOMING PRODUCTS (PART I)

The automotive industry is one of the main drivers of industrial production and is well known for high-quality criteria. In the past, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) pushed forward the main processes of new vehicle production. Today, OEM transfers a great deal of high-level engineering tasks to suppliers. As automotive industries are highly automated robot lines, constituting serial production in millions, the smallest error in a delivered product/component causes the downtime for the whole line. In these situations, it is necessary to validate another supplier of the same component, which can last a very long time. This paper presents a quality management model for incoming components in the automotive industry which can recognize possible risks in the early phase of the component prototype development. The model is successfully applied in a company that produces components for OEM, which will be presented in the second part of the paper.