OREANDA-NEWS. January 30, 2013. General Director of OJSC KAMAZ signed the first order of this year. As usual, it is devoted to quality.

This year’s Order No.1 specifies the Quality Goals for 2013, the Quality 2013 Program, as well as the compositions of committees – a standing quality committee, a safety and technical committee, and a process certification committee at OJSC KAMAZ. The main purpose is to achieve the competitive level of quality of products and services satisfying customers’ requirements.

Besides, the document specifies the main tasks of the year: for example, designing a new quality management structure of OJSC KAMAZ based on Daimler’s experience and introducing a comprehensive customer satisfaction survey. Also, the priority tasks include introducing a project management system based on Advanced Product Quality Planning (APQP), implementing Quality Function Deployment (QFD), Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) in the development or modernization of production, introducing methods for accelerating process stability after process-layout preparation using Statistical Process Control (SPC), Measurement Systems Analysis (MSA). In addition, the company plans to introduce a supply approval process on the basis of Production Part Approval Process (PPAP), an employee incentive program used to reveal and solve problems, a QMS information support system.

Last year, KAMAZ implemented the Quality 2012 Program and managed to improve the quality of vehicle production. For example, the number of defects per vehicle (DPV) decreased by 19%, the number of defects by audit past assembly (APA) dropped by 20.7%, the share of returned products for interplant supply dropped by 1.4%.

The document also says about problems with quality assurance at the enterprise. Thus, for 11 months of this year, the number of reclamations increased by 7.1% in comparison with the same period last year. Losses due to rejects for the above mentioned period grew by 1.6 times. One of the reasons is unsatisfactory calculation of defects at the foundry before July 2012.

To cope with these problems, the company approved a quality manual for suppliers to implement the project “Establishment of Standard Supply Management System as Exemplified in Cooperation between OJSC KAMAZ and JSC Severstal”. 224 CIP-teams are working at all plants to reveal and solve quality assurance problems. The economic effect from the activity of these teams engaged in the continual improvement process made RUB 61.25 million.