Ford Motor Company truly lives by its famous slogan “Quality is Job 1.” You can therefore expect your Ford automobile to be in top shape when it reaches you wherever you may be in the world. That’s the promise of Farzin Ghodsi, Six Sigma Black Belt at Ford Worldwide Direct Market Operations. Succinctly expressing the company’s consumer driven Six-Sigma initiative, Ghodsi says, ?The goal at Ford is to present customers with a vehicle with a ?Factory Fresh Look? no matter where in the world they are located.?
The company decided to deploy Six Sigma after finding out that their vehicles reached their destination points with exterior surface defects. This is how vehicles are prepared for export at the Ford’s manufacturing plants.
Vehicles had transit protection film applied to horizontal surfaces. Transit protection film would protect the vehicle’s exterior on the journey from the plant to the US port and then throughout the ocean voyage to the distributor. During transport, large portions of the transit film lifted away from the vehicle surface and damage occurred. Dirt and debris would become trapped between the loose film and the vehicle’s finish, and the film would lash against the fresh paint and cause defects.
When the vehicles arrived at the port, the port processors had only a few options before loading the vehicles on the ocean-bound transport vessels:
1. Wash the car (which often removed even more of the film).
2. Take no action and chance that more damage would occur to the vehicle before arrival at the final destination.
3. Repair the film ? although the cost of fixing the material was often more costly than the original application.
These options may be few but they can be costly. Thus the company formed a Customer Driven 6-Sigma project team in June of 2001. The team chose two target test locations and one destination market: a Ford manufacturing facility in St. Thomas, Canada; their port processing facility in Delaware; and one destination market – the Middle East region. The reason for these choices were the extreme temperatures and difficult ocean conditions during product transport. The team thought that the journey would be a test for the company’s processes. To be able to reduce defects under these extreme conditions would render whatever improvements robust enough to create positive results in less challenging environments.
By using Design of Experiments (DOE) the team determined which were critical for explaining process variation. The team used MINITAB to understand how the factors interact and to identify areas for intervention and process improvement opportunities.
Ford compared defect rates for:
1. Vehicles covered with existing transit protection film.
2. Vehicles covered with a new protection film.
3. Vehicles without protection film.
The data showed that the new material reduced transit-film-induced defects from 289% (2.89 defects per vehicle) to 129%, as compared to the existing material. Use of the new material also resulted in a significant cost savings since the new material was less expensive.
The results indeed enables the company achieve the following improvements:
1. Using the new material reduced defects to 129%.
2. Using the new material PLUS adding increased supervision and improved training reduced defects to 103%.
The team further discovered that the etch-resistant coating applied to Ford vehicles gave sufficient protection against damage for domestic transport. No transit film was needed until the vehicle was prepared for ocean transport. The move definitely provided over 4500 square feet of manufacturing space for other operations that had been previously been dedicated to transit film installation. It was then decided that the transit film application process be used at the port processing point in Delaware and not at the manufacturing plant in Canada.
Ford Motors Six Sigma project targeted a minimum savings of $250,000. This actual project resulted in cost savings in excess of $500,000.
Ford Motor Company – Driving Down Defect Rates
