USING A TOTAL QUALITY STRATEGY IN A NEW PRACTICAL APPROACH FOR IMPROVING THE PRODUCT RELIABILITY IN AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY

In this paper a Total Quality Management strategy is proposed, refined and used with the aim at improving the quality of large-mass industrial products far beyond the technical specifications demanded at the end-customer level. This approach combines standard and non-standard tools used for Reliability, Availability and Maintainability analysis. The procedure also realizes a stricter correlation between theoretical evaluation methods and experimental evidences as part of a modern integrated method for strengthening quality in design and process. A commercial Intake Manifold, largely spread in the market, is used as test-case for the validation of the methodology. As general additional result, the research underlines the impact of Total Quality Management and its tools on the development of innovation.