Making the Case for Quality

September 2011

Ford Team Project Builds

Relationships, Improves Quality
by Janet Jacobsen
At a Glance . . .
With Ford Fiestas launch
fast approaching, the
organization wrestled with
quality concerns over the
vehicles floor carpets.
Using quality tools, Fords
body engineering team
took on the project,
uncovering complicated
two- and three-way
interactions in the carpet
manufacturing process.
Once these interactions
were understood, the
supplier modified its
process to produce carpets
that met Fords and the
suppliers specifications.
The two-week project
was completed just
prior to the start of mass
production of the Fiesta.
Ford entered this project
in ASQs International
Team Excellence Award
competition, where it
earned finalist honors.

As gas prices continued to rise in

early 2010, so did expectations for the
fuel-efficient Ford Fiesta. Many in the
industry viewed the Fiesta as the most
significant vehicle introduction in the
Ford Motor Companys recent history. To uphold Fords warranty and
customer satisfaction performance, a
flawless launch was vital.
Unfortunately, early tests indicated sigThe 2011 Ford Fiesta
nificant concerns about the quality of
the Fiestas floor carpet. Despite repeated attempts to correct the problems, Ford and the carpet manufacturer, a valued supplier, were unable to solve the issue. Not only was the quality of the Fiesta launch
at risk, but so too was Fords relationship with the supplier.

About Ford Motor Company

The Ford Motor Company, founded in 1903, designs, develops, manufactures, and services cars
and trucks across six continents under the Ford and Lincoln brand names. The company also provides services and products in the areas of maintenance, collision, vehicle accessories, and extended
service warranties under the Genuine Ford Parts, Ford Custom Accessories, and Motorcraft brand
names. Based in Dearborn, Mich., the organization employs more than 166,000 people and operates
70 plants worldwide.
The carpet supplier for the Fiesta is HP Pelzer Automotive Systems, a worldwide Tier 1 supplier of
automotive interior trim and acoustic components. The organizations North American headquarters
are in Troy, Mich., and the manufacturing plant for the Fiestas carpet is located in Eudora, Kan.

Identifying Quality Concerns

With the Ford Fiesta just months away from arriving at dealerships, pre-launch reviews pinpointed
a concernthe vehicles carpet contained visible brush marks. Simply put, the carpets appearance
would not be acceptable to the customer. Ford typically uses warranty and customer satisfaction data to
identify top priority projects. In this case, because the Fiesta was a new product, Ford relied on anticipated warranty and customer satisfaction impact based on historical benchmarks. Addressing the carpet
quality before manufacturing commenced would alleviate customer concerns and avoid warranty costs.

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The carpet quality issue was also straining Fords relationship

with HP Pelzer, as the two organizations spent countless hours
working to achieve product appearance standards and specifications. The deteriorating relationship jeopardized Fords corporate
goals and strategies. The One Ford Plan focuses on working
together as a team and fostering technical excellence to deliver
results. The souring relationship between Ford and HP Pelzer
put elements of the One Ford Plan, shown in Figure 1, at risk.
Finger-pointing, blaming, not working together to solve issues
and share data, and conducting unscientific studies neither fostered technical excellence nor helped deliver results.

Figure 1Risk and impact of the carpet quality issue,

quantified using a 10-point scale, on
Fords corporate goals and strategies
Risk of not
delivering X

Magnitude
of impact =

Measure
of severity

One Team/One Plan

72

Foster technical excellence

42

Own working together

64

Deliver results

10

90

Organizational goal/strategy

Using the DMAIC Framework

With a clear need for analytical expertise, Fords Body Six Sigma
team, a group of Six Sigma Black Belts, was called to lead this
vital project in March 2010. The improvement team included the
following representatives from Ford and the supplier:

Scott Sterbenz, Six Sigma Master Black Belt, Ford Body

Engineering, team leader and DMAIC expert
Pramod Thanedar, Six Sigma Black Belt, Ford Body
Engineering
Gary Danhoff, Six Sigma Black Belt, Ford Body Engineering

Wendy Pinter, Ford Body Engineering supervisor

Jane Aselage, trim manager, Ford Global Car Programs
Jan Ladewig, research and development director, HP Pelzer
Tom Hanners, plant manager, HP Pelzer
Ryan Yamnitz, process engineer, HP Pelzer
Kurt Mueller, quality manager, HP Pelzer
Steve VanHeusden, Ford program manager, HP Pelzer

Members were selected based on their areas of technical expertise and the responsibilities identified within the project. Each
persons participation was dependent on the needs for a particular phase of the project, which followed the define, measure,
analyze, improve, and control (DMAIC) framework of the Six
Sigma methodology.

Defining the Stakeholders

After defining the project scope, one of the first tasks was creating
a supplier, inputs, process, outputs, customers (SIPOC) diagram to
define stakeholders. Internal stakeholders included the Fiesta program team, the Fiesta (Cuautitlan, Mexico) assembly plant, and
members of the Body Six Sigma team, while external stakeholders
included HP Pelzer, and most important, the end customerfuture
owners of the Fiesta. The raw materials supplier was not included
because data showed that raw material quality and variation were
not root causes of the quality issues.

Measuring Critical-to-Quality Factors

Scott Sterbenz, Six Sigma Master Black Belt and team leader,
says the initial meeting with members of the improvement team
focused on the automotive carpet manufacturing process, as
illustrated in Figure 2. We are big believers in knowing how

Figure 2Carpet manufacturing process

Bale
Opener

The card
opens fibers
and lays
them into a
loose twodimensional
felt.

Raw
material
bales of
staple
fibers

Carpet brush marks

Flat needling of loose two-dimensionally

oriented fibers. Pad is bonded by
adding vertical orientation to fibers.

To finished goods,
coating, or surface finishing
Winding
Station

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things work. After all, if you cant explain how something works,
how can you possibly explain how it doesnt? says Sterbenz.

from actual quality impact resulting from the changes to the

needlers settings.

After discussing the current process with HP Pelzers carpet

engineering experts, the team developed a fishbone diagram and
an f(x) cascade. The y = f(x) cascade is a physics and engineering-based flowchart that uses why and how questions to identify
potential root causes. The two key questions are asked until specific measurables are identified. If, through the analyze phase,
these measurables are determined to be the key process input
variables (KPIVs), then control of these KPIVs automatically
leads to control of the key process output variables (KPOVs),
which is the big Y in the y = f(x) equation. In this case, the
y = f(x) cascade brought the team to the needler, which is a
machine that has a bed of needles that penetrate the raw material
to produce the pile of the carpet. The needler and the needler settings became the factors in the design of experiments (DOE).
It is essentially through the DOE that certain needler settings
were determined to be the KPIVs. At the end of the project,
Sterbenz says the team was able to control the KPIVs and therefore control the big Ythe carpet quality parameters.

Analyzing for Root Cause

He explains that it was clear from the start that the needler was
critically important to the carpets overall quality. Fortunately,
the needler had a limited number of settings to manipulate, offering an ideal situation for using DOE to optimize the process and
conduct root cause analysis. Although HP Pelzer had changed
the needler settings in past studies, Fords Black Belts found that
the trials had been done unscientifically by changing one factor
at a time.
Once the DOE planning was complete, the Ford team members traveled to HP Pelzers plant in Eudora, Kan., where they
viewed carpet samples produced when the needler settings were
altered. They quickly noticed that while some carpets were quite
plush, others were the unappealing texture of felt. At this point,
the team decided that brush marking and softness/plushness
would both be treated as responses in the DOE.
Next, the team assembled an evaluation jury comprised of Ford
and HP Pelzer representatives to conduct a gauge repeatability
and reproducibility (R&R) study on the two responses. Brush
markings and softness/plushness were each rated using an ordinal ranking scale, with 110 used for brush markings and 15
used for softness/plushness. The higher the rating, the better the
quality. Since both responses were attribute and ordinal in nature,
Kendalls Co-efficient of Concordance was used as the indicator
of success. This formula measures directional agreement with
a value of greater than 0.7 for both responses, indicating that
the team could trust the jury to evaluate the carpets fairly and
consistently. In addition, the team knew that shifts in the ratings
were not because of variation in the jurys opinion, but instead

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Despite careful planning, the team experienced some unexpected

issues during the DOE. The first four runs took three hours to
finish. Sterbenz says the biggest obstacle was simply coordinating the experiment because the carpet manufacturing process is
complex and uses a continuous roll of material. It would have
been wasteful to conduct each DOE run combination on individual rolls. The only alternative was making changes to the
machine settings on the fly and marking the roll where those
changes were made, which required great coordination and more
manpower than originally anticipated. It took us a few hours
and a few botched runs to work out the logistics, but we got it.
This created some stressful moments where I thought the DOE
would be abandoned, but through teamwork and some quick
problem solving, we succeeded, explains Sterbenz.
The next step was analyzing the DOE using an analysis of variance table, Pareto chart, and plots of the interactions and main
effects. When analyzing the data from the brush marks, it became
clear why HP Pelzer struggled to achieve the specified quality by
unsystematically adjusting the needlers settingsthere were two
significant three-way interactions and several significant two-way
interactions. The analysis for softness/plushness was less complex
with only two significant effects, and this simplified the process of
simultaneously optimizing both responses.
Sterbenz explains that the DOE not only provided a list of significant variables and interactions, but also a transfer function
between the inputs and the response. The transfer function is the
mathematical and/or physics relationship between the KPIV and
the KPOV. In this case, the transfer function shows the mathematical relationship between the settings in the needler (KPIV)
and the carpet quality (KPOV).
Using the suppliers knowledge of the carpet process and the
analysis of the DOE, the team felt certain that the variables that
control brush marking and softness/plushness were identified. It
was clear to all that previous needler setting adjustments were
not successful because of significant interactions among the
variables. Now armed with mathematical models for each of
the responses, the team set targets and, after validation, moved
ahead with using optimization solvers to uncover the best settings for both brush marks and softness/plushness.
The data analysis was shared at a full team meeting when the
optimum needler settings were presented. Unfortunately, these
settings were not acceptable because they could damage the
needler if used for extended periods and one of the factor settings could adversely affect the carpets durability. These two
new constraints meant that additional analysis was needed.

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Figure 3Ford Fiesta carpet before and after the DOE

Baseline carpets:

DOE optimized carpets:

3.0 rating for brush marking

8.2 rating for brush marking

2.5 rating for softness/plushness

3.8 rating for softness/plushness

No brush marking

Brush marking

Improving Carpet Quality

Despite the new constraints, the team determined two new optimized factor settings for the needler. The new settings were
projected to deliver significantly higher levels of quality for both
brush marks and plushness/softness. The next step was producing samples of both options for the jury to evaluate. Happily,
neither sample had visible brush markings, and the softness/
plushness was much improved over the baseline. The jurys ratings8.2 (out of 10, and both samples were rated the same) for
brush markings and 3.7 (out of 5 for option one) and 3.8 (for
option two) on softness/plushnessclosely matched the mathematical model predictions. Ultimately, the team selected option
two because it produced a slightly more plush carpet. Figure 3
shows the difference in the carpet quality after the DOE.
The final samples were tested to ensure that additional factors
such as color, sheen, wear, durability, stain resistance, and uniform pile direction were not compromised. The samples passed
all validation testing.

Setting Controls to Sustain Improvements

Plans to implement the final improvement actions quickly and
maintain the results involved the following tasks:

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Communicating the new process to HP Pelzer employees.

Programming the needler with the new settings.
Monitoring the quality of the carpets produced.
Monitoring the condition of the needler.

In addition to improving the carpet for the new Fiesta, the team
wanted to ensure that future models were protected as well. By
documenting the gauge R&R methodology and the transfer
function development process with the supplier, along with
implementing quality and maintenance control plans, the team
played a role in the quality of both current and future models.

Project Yields Tangible Benefits

While production of the Fiesta had not begun, the project, which
took less than two weeks to complete, provided valuable benefits
for Ford and HP Pelzer, such as protecting customer satisfaction,
avoiding warranty claims, and eliminating scrap materials, as
shown in Figure 4 (on next page).
The intangible benefits were significant as well:

A stronger relationship with the supplier.

Increased technical knowledge.
The creation of a new optimization process for the supplier.
A great product for customers.
The creation of a Six Sigma program by HP Pelzer to
increase efficiency and improve quality.

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Figure 4Tangible benefits for both Ford and the supplier

Realized Tangible Benefit

Recipient

Value

Validation

Warranty avoidance

Ford

$630 per claim

No warranty claims (mass production

started in May 2010).

Scrap avoidance

HP Pelzer

$1,200 per roll

No scrapped carpet rolls (mass

production began in April 2010).

Customer satisfaction
Loss avoidance

Ford

Proprietary calculation

_____________________________
External customer

_____________________________________
Carpets that look and feel as expected

No customer complaints about carpet quality

on either internal or external surveys.

This project also clearly achieved the goals of the One Ford
strategy. Fords relationship with the supplier was strengthened
through teamwork and the mutual sharing of expertise.
Sterbenz says that team building and understanding the critical
KPIVs were the keys to the success of this project. It was surprising to us that scientific experiments had not been conducted
prior to this project to fully understand the KPIVs. Now that
the KPIVs are understood, we have much better control over
the process and understand how to control the sensitivity of
certain factors.
Improvement projects typically encounter resistance during the
implementation phase. In this case, questions came earlier when
the DOE was conducted and the supplier was concerned about
potential damage to the needler and possible adverse side effects
on carpet durability. These issues were addressed by providing
training and successful examples, along with leveraging the statistical expertise of Fords Six Sigma Black Belts.

Sharing the Success Story

Ford, an enterprise member of ASQ, believes in the value of sharing quality success stories because tools or methods used in one
project can often be useful in another. The results of this improvement project were shared with several other teams at Ford and HP
Pelzer and with a wider audience through ASQs International
Team Excellence Award (ITEA) process. Team FordBody

ASQ

Engineering competed in the 2011 ITEA and was named as one

of 29 finalists. Team members shared their story with a live audience at the 2011 World Conference on Quality and Improvement,
where they captured the best OEM/supplier relationship award and
earned second place in the team display competition.
Sterbenz says this project was a good candidate for the ITEA
process because the team used quality tools to reduce the defect
rate to zero, and after one year, there have been no warranty
claims on the carpet and no scrapped carpets. That is total success and the epitome of teambuilding, he states.

For More Information

To learn more about this project, contact Scott Sterbenz at

ssterben@ford.com.
Complete details on ASQs ITEA process are available at
wcqi.asq.org/team-competition.
Read more case studies on successful quality improvement
projects in the ASQ Knowledge Center at asq.org/
knowledge-center.

About the Author

Janet Jacobsen is a freelance writer specializing in quality and
compliance topics. A graduate of Drake University, she resides
in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

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