How We Serve You : White Papers
How Effective Are Your APQP Efforts?
Key to Success: Practice What You Preach
In many cases we don’t want to admit that we have some doubts about the effectiveness of our efforts in Advanced Quality Planning, so we keep quiet and “go with the flow.” It is still viewed as a “quality initiative,” so the final responsibility comes back to the quality department at crunch time. We take old forms and update them and resubmit them at the appropriate time. We know this may not be correct, but we only do enough to get by.
So, now that you have confessed, how can you truly ensure that APQP is effective in your organization? How can you measure the effectiveness of APQP? How can you convince top management and all the individuals who should be involved in the process to really focus on APQP? This means knowing what to do and doing the right things right.
The most important thing is that we need to practice Advanced Product Quality Planning. We need to see it as more than a list of activities that need to be done in order to meet the submission requirements at launch. Instead, we need to see APQP as a process that has inputs, prescribed steps and an output.
The input to the process requires identifying the various customers and understanding their requirements. This is a critical component of ensuring an effective APQP process, but one that is often given scant attention. The output of the APQP process is the creation of a product that meets the functional and performance requirements of the customer. It also gives us the ability to manufacture the product consistently and with as little waste as possible. This means that a product launch has technical as well as business implications and should be the concern of the entire organization. It is not just the responsibility of certain functional areas.
