Sitting Engineer: APQP

What is APQP?

Its purpose is to produce a quality plan which supports the development of a product or service that will satisfy the customer. APQP can be applied to any industry

APQP is a defined process for a product development system. Firstly used by Ford, GM, Chrysler, and their suppliers.

APQP is an attempt to provide a common path and synchronization of product development activities.

APQP is an attempt to ensure communication both within a company and with their customer.

Why use APQP?

Understanding the customer's needs
-Determine customer needs and translate them into product characteristics and requirements.
Proactive feedback and corrective action
-Provides other feedback for similar projects with the objective of developing solutions for potential failures.
Ensuring that the design is within your process capabilities
-This ensures that your manufacturing process can meet customer requirements and quantities.
Identify and analyze potential failure modes
-This uses failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) to solve potential failures.
Verification and validation of design process and product
-This is testing to assure that the design output meets design input requirements.
Control special or critical characteristics.
-Special/critical characteristics are identified and the process is assessed to assure it can meet the requirements.

Steps

Each APQP is unique. Therefore, there may be changes in the steps. The documents prepared during this process are called PPAP.

Here are some resources I used.