Designing and Design Reviewing for Preventing Quality Problems in Automotive Parts

Recently, enhancements to product quality from the standpoint of consumer protection have become a prerequisite in responding to the increase of social awareness of product quality. The results of our researches^{[1, 2]} on quality problems suggest that they were often induced by a known contributing factor, which means many of them could have been prevented if the design engineers and/or design reviewers had “smelled” the known factors. This report describes the steps taken by the System Control Components Product Division in DENSO Corporation in order to make a change to the existing quality control strategy by providing a new systematic tool for conveying know-how needed to prevent recurrences of quality problems.