Advanced Product Quality Planning (APQP) is a quality framework used to develop new products in the automotive industry. It can be applied to any industry and is similar in many respects to the Design Concept for Six Sigma (DFSS). Its purpose is "to produce a product quality plan that supports the development of a product or services that satisfies the customer."
It does this by focusing on:
Planning above quality
Evaluating the output to determine if customers are satisfied and support continuous improvement
The advanced product quality planning process consists of four phases and five major activities along with ongoing feedback assessment and corrective action as shown below.
Another indication of the APQP process is to examine the process outputs by phase.
This is demonstrated in the table below:
The APQP process involves these important elements:
Understand customer needs
This is done using the voice of customer techniques to determine customer needs and through the deployment of the quality function to organize those needs and translate them into product characteristics / requirements.
Proactive feedback and corrective action.
The advance quality planning process provides feedback from other similar projects with the objective of becoming countermeasures in the current project. Other mechanisms with verification and validation, design reviews, customer feedback analysis and warranty data also satisfy this objective.
Design within process capabilities
This objective assumes that the company has brought processes under statistical control, determined their process capability, and communicated process capability to its development staff. Once this is done, the development staff needs to formally determine that the critical or special characteristics are within the action of the process or insider's ability to improve the process or to acquire a more capable team.
Analyze and mitigate failure modes.
This is done using techniques such as failure modes and performs early failure analysis or determination.
Verification and validation.
Design verification is testing to ensure that design outputs meet design input requirements. Design verification may include activities such as: alternate design reviews, performing calculations, understanding tests and demonstrations, and review of design documents prior to release. Validation is the process of ensuring that the product conforms to the defined needs, requirements, and / or specifications of the user under defined operating conditions. The design validation is carried out in the final product design with the parts that meet the calculation intent.The validation of the production is carried out in the final product design with the parts that solve the production processes produced from the calculation attempt planned for normal production.
Design reviews.
Design reviews are understood to be formal reviews conducted during the development of a product to ensure that the requirements, concept, product or process satisfies the requirements of that stage of development, issues, risks are being managed, and there are a good business case for development. Typical design reviews include: requirements review, concept / preliminary design review, final design review, and a production preparation / launch review
Check the special critic characteristics.
Special critical features are identified with the quality function display or other similar structured method. Once these characteristics are understood, and there is an assessment that the process is capable of satisfying these characteristics (and their tolerances), the process must be controlled. A control plan is prepared to indicate how this will be achieved. Control plans provide a written description of the systems used in minimizing variance including equipment, equipment layout, product and process processing, tooling, accessories, material, preventive maintenance and methods.
The advanced product quality planning process is supported by our product development toolbox.
Bibliography
www.npd-solutions.com/apqp.html
