Nissan improves vehicle quality as they open a new Field Quality Center or FQC. The said facility will focus on vehicle quality enhancement processes and will also conduct Field Quality Investigation Analysis or FQIA, to identify the root cause and solutions to vehicle problems. The center would be based at the Nissan Technical Center in Atsugi-shi, Kanagawa.

FQC will be a central collection base for incident parts received directly from the dealerships, where the parts are then subjected to detailed analysis. Equipped with the with state of the art testing equipment and measuring instruments, the center will be able to find out the cause of a problematic car part. This will then pave way to solutions of the particular product.

The FQC works jointly with the product development and manufacturing engineer teams in order to facilitate a continuous “quality improvement” process. The FQC findings are fed back to the Nissan Technical Center (NTC), where upcoming vehicles are being developed.

Nissan Senior Vice President, Total Customer Satisfaction, Kazumasa Katoh said, “The FQC will boost Nissan’s ability to deliver higher customer satisfaction. At the FQC, we will work to improve the quality of Nissan’s vehicles from every aspect in accordance with the Nissan Product Quality Policy (NPQP).” By applying the philosophy of “san-gen shugi” or “the principle of three-origins”, Nissan will endeavor to find solutions to quality issues by seeking out the root of the problem from three perspectives – the real part (genbutsu), on-site vehicle operating conditions (genba) and fact-based data (genjitsu).”

Nissan invested 900 million yen or $7.29 million into the facility, which occupies a 4,400m2 area, within the Nissan Technical Center campus. Construction of the center was completed in June 2007, giving an approximately 210 jobs. The FQC was designed to facilitate collaborative efforts with working areas dedicated to manufacturing engineer teams and supplier-partners. It is presently working on 10 quality projects in collaboration with different auto-parts suppliers.

The new facility will give Nissan the ability to process four times the quantity of parts-investigation compared to its previous capacity. Prior to the opening of FQC, Nissan’s field quality improvement team was located at the Shinkoyasu Operations Center in Yokohama.

Globally, Nissan has three other FQC facilities in operation since 2006, two are located in the U.S at Smyrna and Farmington Hills and another in Cranfield, U.K. for Europe. The FQC in Atsugi will serve the Japan domestic market as well as more than 140 countries in the General Overseas Market (GOM). All four global FQC facilities collaborate closely through constant communication in order to enhance Nissan’s global standard of quality.

Nissan will not be left behind with any technical advancement that may help improve their vehicles’ quality. In fact, the FQC is just one of the company’s facilities that help in product development. Other major investments the company had were Nissan Global Training Center (GTC) to train global experts in the Nissan Production Way (NPW), Nissan Global Production Engineering Center (GPEC) to standardize production engineering and global manufacturing processes, and Nissan Advanced Technology Center (NATC) to focus on breakthrough technologies for the future.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007 at 2:22 am and is filed under Nissan corporate news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.