Development of an improvement plan aimed towards OBD-certification issues at Volvo Cars Corporation

Abstract

At Volvo Cars Corporation in Gothenburg, Sweden, the On-Board-Diagnostic certification process is performed in-house and it has been concluded that there is room for improvement concerning the procedure. Historically collected data has shown that a large number of re-tests were made during the certification as a result of faulty certification tests. In order to cover up for parts of this faultiness, this project has been undertaken with purpose to identify the most critical errors occurring during the certification process and suggest how the errors can be overcome. With the aim of identifying the most critical errors during the procedure, data was collected in which interviews and surveys were held with three different roles; software engineers, test operators and mechanics who are directly involved in the certification procedure. This effort contributed to one portion of the data that was used in the error selection process while observations and historical data represented the other portion of data. The outcome of the data collection clearly shows that the majority of all re-tests made were dependent on problems related to the software used in the cars. In order to tackle the software related problems, the author made a review of three different improvement models; DMAIC, 8D and Shainin. The results of this comparison showed that a combination of DMAIC and 8D frameworks were best suitable to be applied for the project. The application of these improvement strategies on the software problem led to three different causes, in which each cause had between one and three proposed solutions. The improvement project was led by the researcher in which he was responsible for all activities related to the problem resolution.