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Monitoring the screwdriving assembly process to detect errors sooner

Product recalls are the fear of every industry. Automobile defects are especially in the public eye. An automobile recall is mandatory when stemming from an unforeseen, unavoidable and imminent threat to personal safety. When a particular vehicle type is identified as a risk, the original automobile manufacturer will initiate a “vehicle recall”. With the support of the government automobile registration authority, individual owners of the affected vehicles are identified. With this information the manufacturer can notify the owners directly to return the vehicle to their local service provider for modification. Additional to this the automobile registration authority maintains the statistics for vehicle recalls. For example: in 2008 the German “Kraftfahrtbundesamt” documented 148 cases involving 726,000 vehicles which were recalled by the manufacturer.

For the past few years vehicle recall statistics for Germany would imply a downward trend. There were 148 cases in 2008, whereas 2007 recorded 157 recalls and in 2006 167. Possibly these improved figures represent a general effort within the automobile manufacturing industry, including the full supply chain (for example 2nd and 3rd tier suppliers), to improve process monitoring and control of safety related components during assembly. Due to product liability as set out by legislation, quality management in the automobile manufacturing industry and increasingly for all manufacturers involved in automated production enjoys the highest priority.