Just Suppose
Just suppose you were hired by a major towable RV manufacturer as the vice president of quality. The company said they are tired of customer complaints. They want to change the perception of their com...
Forum Discussion
Gjac wrote:jwmII wrote:Don't you think that reducing warranty costs would be an incentive to improve the product? From what I have seen most of the problems are not quality problems but design/mfg process problems. I don't believe that workers are lazy and purposely try to put out an inferior product. I also don't believe you can inspect quality into the product it has to be part of the design/build process itself. I would focas on fewer products so that I could afford good production tooling and NC mfg processes. It is hard to justify spending a lot of money up front if they only build low volume units. The more workers have to layout holes and cut things by hand the more mistakes are made. NC layouts and production tools eliminate these mistakes and will make a more uniform product.
Today it was announced that September 2016 was one of the bigger months for RV sales in the recent past. Unfortunately there were no announcements regarding any of the manufacturers ramping up their quality. There is not much incentive to improve quality as long as there are record sales each month.
Warranty costs are not a factor because these vehicles are being sold with substantial profit margins and warranty costs per unit are cheap when you see what a manufacturer pays a selling dealer for warranty work. Also independents that take on warranty work are cheaply paid. So much so that many will not do warranty repair.
Dealers have to provide separate staff in many cases to handle the warranty expenses for the numerous lines they sell.
As far as CNC equipment to do a lot of the work; There is no incentive to spend the big money those tools require along with the training the operators require when you can hire illegal immigrants off the clock for half the money and no benefits. All that is really needed is round wheels at each corner so it can be shoved out the door to the next station and then on to a dealer and an unsuspecting buyer who then have to sort the whole mess out most of the time with less than satisfactory results.
