3 - Jacobs University

Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Research Question and Research Motivation 3
3 Research Approach 8
3.1 General Strategy for Employing the Quality Audit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
3.2 Effectiveness of Implementation of a Single Quality Audit . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
4 Specifics of the Automotive Industry 17
4.1 Internationalization of the Automotive Operations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
4.2 Rising Development Costs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
4.3 The Automotive Supply Chain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
4.4 Implications for the General Automotive Quality Auditing Strategy . . . . . . . . . 28
5 Fundamental Principles of the Quality Audit 32
5.1 Audit Planning, Initiation and Preparation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
5.2 On-site Evaluation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
5.3 Reporting and Closure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
6 Empirical Data 39
6.1 Quality Capability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
6.2 Quality Performance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
6.3 Automation of the Data Processing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
6.3.1 Matching Quality Capability and Quality Performance . . . . . . . . . . . 56
6.3.2 Supplier Identification . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
7 Results and Discussion 58
7.1 State and Quality of the Available Empirical Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
7.2 Possible Sources of Data Bias . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
7.2.1 Revisions of Volkswagen’s Quality Auditing Process . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
7.2.2 Period of Relevance of Quality Audit Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
7.2.3 The Factor ”Human” and People Calibration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
7.2.3.1 Calibration of Supplier Quality Auditors . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
7.2.3.2 Calibration of Production Quality Assessment . . . . . . . . . . 88
7.3 Matching Quality Capability and Quality Performance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
7.4 Relation Between Number of Defective Parts and Delivery Amount . . . . . . . . 102
8 Conclusion 121
8.1 General Auditing Strategy (Sampling Frequency) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
8.2 Effectiveness of Individual Audits (Accuracy of Samples) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
8.3 Answers of the Research Questions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
Appendices 133
A Results from the analysis presented in Section 7.2.1 133
B Results from the analysis presented in Section 7.2.3.2 155
B.1 List of Material Groups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
References 162
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