AIAG Conference Spotlights Automotive Best Practices

The Automotive Industry Action Group’s (AIAG) first-ever Best Practices Summit — held in conjunction with Quality Expo Detroit — on June 7-8, 2006, at the Rock Financial Showplace in Novi, Mich., will present common business practices to help the supply chain reduce cost and variation and improve quality and efficiency.

At the two-day conference, OEMs, suppliers, solution providers and government will discuss best practices in three session tracks:

* Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) – Wed., June 7. The state of PLM, along with collaborative efforts in OEM future directions, interoperability, engineering visualization, digital manufacturing, engineering change management best practices and implementation strategies will be discussed.

* Quality – Thurs., June 8. Core tool sessions for FMEA, MSA, SPC and PPAP will delve into best practices and changes to the manuals from DaimlerChrysler Corp., Ford Motor Co. and General Motors Corp. The new special process for heat treat to ensure quality, reliability and durability of components undergoing heat treatment before they reach the consumer also will be highlighted.

* Global Metrology Congress – Thurs., June 8. The latest advancements and successes from achieving interoperability between dissimilar systems and processes in the metrology domain will be featured in this series of presentations. Panelists from DaimlerChrysler, Ford, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), DMIS and Ogihara America Corp. will participate in an open forum discussion on the status of global metrology interoperability.

The full conference agenda with session descriptions is available from AIAG’s Web site at https://mows.aiag.org/staticcontent/abpsummit.pdf

At Booth #1138 on the exhibit floor, AIAG will demonstrate its new, global Metrology Quality Measurement (MEQM) data standard based on XML. This open and non-proprietary global standard will streamline the process, slash product development times by up to three weeks and eliminate cost resulting from customers having to interpret as many as 1,500 different and proprietary data formats.

The Quality Expo Detroit runs concurrently with the AIAG Best Practices Summit and offers an array of workshops and sessions covering a variety of quality-related topics including SPC, Six Sigma, lean, machine vision application, FMEA, quality fundamentals and more. More than 200 companies will display a full range of quality-related solutions for manufacturers.