Career Episode 1: Improving Luggage Closing Performance of the New Generation Corolla
a) Introduction
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This episode covers a specific engineering problem that I solved during my work experience at Toyota Motor Manufacturing Turkey (TMMT) which is located in Sakarya, Turkey. I joined to TMMT on November 19, 2012, and, left the company on March 13, 2016 -totally 3 years and 4 months. I worked at Toyota as "Quality Assurance (QA) Engineer", and my main duty was to ensure the quality of the side exterior parts of the vehicles supplied from various suppliers in mass production until May 2014. On May 2014, my responsibility was changed, and I became responsible for quality of the chassis parts of the vehicles. This chance did not affect my title, it remained same. In this episode, I will briefly explain how I solved the Top#1 Customer complaint of new generation Toyota Corolla during the first part of my TMMT career.
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There were total 71 FTRs with a significant increasing trend. Therefore, I set my ultimate goal as to produce high-quality vehicles exceeding customer expectations. My concern was increasing number of FTRs which was the indicator of major field problems. This might decrease customer satisfaction and brand quality image of Toyota, and increase the warranty cost paid by the company.
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Secondly, I made the breakdown of the problem in terms of specific parts. The majority was luggage part of the vehicle with 29 FTRs. Then, I checked these 29 FTRs in terms of problem type. 28 of them were functional problems, and 26 of these 28 were reported as luggage cannot be closed. When I more deeply investigated the reports, I found out that 22 of them were related to closing difficulty of the luggage. Customers were mostly complaining about the poor closing performance of the luggage from left and right sides.
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