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Reliability, maintainability/serviceability and security are three qualities of product excellence desired by customers and users of products, however customer expectation for product reliability are continually increasing for almost all product and despite of most of the companies has worked on the philosophy of continuous improvement to meet or exceed the customer's expectations, its difficult to avoid failures or its difficult to ensure zero defect. Once it happens, it generate a customer complaint which is registered by companies. The way that companies used to register the complaints is through their warranty system and also a special database. Most of the companies maintain warranty databases for purposes of financial reporting and warranty expense forecasting. In some cases, there are attempts to extract engineering information from such databases. Another application is to use warranty data to detect potentially serious field reliability problems as early as possible.

Few products or services exist that do not require some supply chain management. The more suppliers that are involved the more complex the supply chain management becomes. Even if the entire supply chain from basic raw materials that come from the earth or out of the minds and actions of people, is not considered there is still a supply chain that must be attended and in today's global economy competition is growing every day, and automotive products (vehicles and components) are often developed in one country though it's made based on global architectures, used and applied in other markets, and to find success in this competitive reality, automakers and/or global business migrated from local suppliers to global sourcing and in today's world of global outsourcing, supply chain management plays an ever important, strategic and expanding role in delivering results once automakers are aiming to launch low cost vehicles and recognized as world best-in-class products.

According to several customer perception survey, Squeak and Rattle (S&R) is among the top most annoying defects. Consequently, GMB engineering design, development and validation process must be continuously improved and consistently applied to all platforms to guarantee that all products are free from squeaks and rattles. This paper introduces those concepts and discusses some strategies to eliminate or minimize S&R. Concepts and tests results are commented. Finally, the challenge in detection and analysis of S&R is discussed. Objective and subjective evaluation methodologies are being developed and suppliers training and integration have been improved

In the automotive industries, time and parts production costs are fundamental, mainly in prototyping production. The RTV (Room Temperature Vulcanized) process is an important alternative production to flexible silicone molds when you need to inject polyurethane parts. The objective is time reduction in tooling production and parts. RTV requires notable initial investments in equipments. Many times, this cost does not fit in the automotive third part company's budget. This work shows how is possible to obtain parts by RTV process with excellent quality, without high investments in equipments and without quality loss in produced parts. Lead times and tooling and parts costs are analyzed. Due to equipments low costs, this alternative is accessible not only to automotive industries but also to small and medium suppliers.

This work conducted an optimization in sheet metal blank's sizes for cold pressing automotive parts, comparing dimensional characteristics of automotive hood outer panels deep drawn with commonly used blank sizes for this process. As a result, it was possible to suggest modifications to smaller blank sizes, accordingly to the improvement accomplished in this work. The experimental study was conducted from observations in part's superficial aspects after its deep drawing process, which was realized in a commonly used tooling for automotive industry, with a blank's width reduction for the suggested case. The results showed a cost reduction opportunity based in this optimization.

The definition of the ride attribute is very difficult because it is part of human perception during driving. For vehicle dynamics work, have details of what is good or what is bad considering driving comfort, usually, induces some controversial opinions. In this work, the use of a single accelerometer is shown as a tool to characterize the basic vehicle vibrational behavior and so support the correlation between human perception and the resulting ride comfort presented. By using PSD theory, it is possible to “see” how the vehicle vibrates and so have a better understanding of where in the vehicle is located a possible issue and how to fix it. In a more advanced point of view is possible to characterize each vehicle with a ride “personality”, this meaning how each brand and model behave and so how vehicle behave to the consumer approve or complain about it..

Microphone array based techniques have a growing range of applications in the vehicle development process. This paper evaluates the use of Spherical Beamforming (SB) to investigate the transmission of wind-generated noise into the passenger cabin, as one of the alternative ways to perform in-vehicle troubleshooting and design optimization. On track measurements at dominant wind noise conditions are taken with the spherical microphone array positioned at the front passenger head location. Experimental diligence and careful processing necessary to enable concise conclusions are briefly described. The application of Spherical Harmonics Angularly Resolved Pressure (SHARP) and the Filter-And-Sum (FAS) algorithms is compared. Data analysis variables, run-to-run repeatability and system capability to identify design modifications are studied.