This short article has as objective to highlight some best practices that the auto industry is applying on the last 20 years.

1. AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY COULD BE THE ANSWER
By Alessandro Silveira
My career started in the automotive industry, and there I
stayed for ten years. During that period, I remember myself
questioning if any other industry sector could be a bench-
marking reference as the automotive industry was for me.
On the last years, I’ve being observing that more and more
companies are looking for auto industry best practices in-
stead of spending time, efforts and resources on “new”
tools that most of the time are based on the same ones
already used in the automotive industry. Just as a recent
example, I had a chance to participate in an event led by a
company that is on the market for over than 80 years, this
company is designing and manufacturing complex products
with high technology level.
During the event, the company presented the initiative re-
lated to PPAP(Production Part Approval Process) and APQP
(Advanced Product Quality Planning) implementation as
internal processes, in case that it is not known, both meth-
ods were developed in the automotive industry more than
20 years ago.
As an illustrational approach, let’s take a very high overview
of the auto industry:
- Engine Production of a particular plant in the US, daily
production volume of around 1,600 units and with a takt
time of 30 seconds. Each engine has around 200 parts per
engine.
- Japan has produced in 2016, over than 9 million vehi-
cles, what would give 750,000 per month or around 25,000
vehicles per day. The production cycle time of a vehicle can
be around 40 to 60 hours, and each vehicle can have
around 30,000 parts.
All the numbers mentioned above is just to give a general
overview of the complexity behind of the whole operation.
Have you ever thought about the possibility to apply SMED
to improve a process that is related to multi-site transac-
tions?
Have you ever thought about the opportunity to apply Fault
Tree Analysis on your company KPIs to have a clear visibility
of the key drivers and use it to prioritize initiatives related
to continuous improvement? (See Figure A)
There is no need to “re-invent the wheel” when it is related
to tools and practices that are related to operations perfor-
mance improvement, and in use for decades by the auto-
motive industry, it is just a question of adapting according
to your company needs.
It is evident the importance of hitting the quarter KPI’s ob-
jectives, but one of the questions that should be asked is
about the amount of efforts and resources that are con-
sumed to reach it and if it was taken the “cutting corners”
approach. In case that the answer was for “cutting corners”
approach, it is expected already that some critical internal
and external processes are not sustainable and consequent-
ly wastes will be generated.
On figure B, it is possible to observe some performance
issues that contribute negatively to a value chain and some
best practices utilized by the automotive industry. Just tak-
ing those seven best practices listed in figure A, it is possible
to affirm that you can solve over than 50% of the perfor-
mance issues that your company is facing actually.
It is important to mention that it takes time and require a
robust and solid assessment to end up with a strategic plan-
ning that will be converted in a projects pipeline that has to
be managed properly and implemented according to com-
pany and business needs.
This approach is not a privilege just for big business as the
one mentioned at the beginning, small businesses can fol-
low the same path but with a different scale. In the end, the
objective is to reach operational excellence by optimizing
your resources and assets.