By Carla Kalogeridis

The automotive industry is growing more global by the hour, and industry leaders understand that the world’s automotive challenges are their automotive challenges. Recently, Actionline had the opportunity to get an enlightening perspective from several European and North American quality executives from DNV Certification, who have their finger on the pulse of world quality trends.

Supply Chain Management
“Managing requirements is the evolution of where a lot of quality work is going right now—whether it’s environmental, quality or legislative,” says Yehuda Dror, Regional General Manager of DNV Certification in North America. “But, one of the hottest topics in the industry right now is supply chain management.”

DNV Certification is a global quality registrar, so it’s privy to a great deal of feedback from OEMs and suppliers around the world. “It’s not uncommon to hear OEMs say, ‘OK, all my suppliers are all registered to ISO 9000, but I’m still having problems,’” says Henrick Madsen, DNV’s chief operating officer of certification globally. “The reality is that certification alone doesn’t mean that everything magically falls into place. The supply chain and processes still need to be managed.”

The group agrees that organizations like AIAG and its counterparts in Europe—VDA (Germany), Galia (France) and Odette (Sweden)—have had positive impact on the global quality scene and will remain crucial to the industry’s efforts to progress. “The simple way of looking at AIAG is as an organization that gets everyone in the industry together to define the requirements,” says Michael Frohlich, global automotive director, DNV Certification. “But, the next focus will be on opening up the certification process to additional services, such as ratings and assessments. Many AIAG-type organizations around the world have working groups addressing this already, but coming up with the solutions and then deploying them to the industry is a challenge.”

“AIAG is that common ground where suppliers and OEMs get together and OEMs say, ‘OK, here are my expectations. Now what can we do, how can we work this out?’” adds Robert Djurovic, DNV’s director of
automotive services, North America. “The tighter the economy gets, the higher the expectations are, and that’s when the role of AIAG gets even more critical.”

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