Zero-defect quality is possible and the cost of not having it can be enormous.

About the author: Fernando Revilla Andreo

Fernando Revilla is a quality management specialist with more than 30 years of experience in the automotive, manufacturing and urban mobility industries. He has led quality and continuous improvement projects in companies such as LECA Graphics – Lantero Group, Silence and Nissan, managing key processes from new model development to production optimization. His approach combines deep technical knowledge with a strategic vision to transform data into decisions that improve efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Fernando Revilla is Nissan’s PQE (Parts Quality Manager) and has been working in the automotive sector for almost three decades. We talked to him about data digitalization and its importance in the communication between customers and suppliers.

What is the status of data digitization in the industry?

From the quality point of view, the situation with Covid has not exploded new situations, but has accentuated some that were coming. One of the fundamental problems in the quality world is to ensure when and how changes are made.

If you always manufacture everything in the same way, you will not have problems, which do appear with changes when they are not made in a controlled manner. With Covid, we could have problems with suppliers who were forced to stop production and resume it months later, workers who are now doing one production and tomorrow another or who leave the company and new workers enter. How can we control that the changes are done well? The reality of the country tells us that digitalization is far from 100%, even though we are all clear that digitalization is a phenomenon that has been here for a long time. And when we have data, we find that they are not intercommunicated with each other; I have Excel groups in different areas that are not connected and do not give me information. I have to go in one by one to consult the data.

In times of constant change, is Excel a waste of time and money?

It makes everything very difficult. If everything is in Excel or on paper and you have operators who have changed departments or are no longer with the company, it gets very complicated. The better the digitization, the easier it is to have the data.

Will it be more difficult to have a future without already being digitized?

Not making quality is very expensive. Some time ago it was normal to have quality problems from time to time. It was logical and human, but now having quality with zero defects is feasible and real. You have software for management and detection hardware has become much cheaper. A customer can understand if you have a problem, but he will not understand if you repeat a defect or have defects continuously.

In Nissan we have local suppliers, but others are very far away. Can you imagine sending a container with parts in Japan and when the containers arrive after months by sea the parts are bad and have to be made again? The expense is beastly. You can have quality with zero defects and the cost of not having it can be enormous.

Kapture.io facilitates precisely the communication between the customer and the supplier to know the status of each part.

The first thing you should know as a manufacturer is how your house is. It cannot happen, for example, that a week after starting the post-confinement you realize that the quality controls are not being done because the operator is no longer there and the new one did not know that he should do them. Or you have continuous problems in production and no one has warned you even though they appear in the paperwork. It is very expensive.

If you don’t know what is going on in your home, it will be difficult for you to provide good customer service. When you know because you have the data and they are reliable, you are no longer in the situation of depending on the report of a person who has taken data from a person who has been given the data by someone else. You are now able to share the information with the customer and that’s why you have to digitize the data. Kapture.io helps you in the process to make it easily understandable.

Years ago, it would have been easier to deal with the customer when there were errors, but now, does the increase in the level of demand make it necessary to have the data digitized?

To put it another way, if you don’t have control of your house you will have problems and sooner or later they will reach the customer. Nowadays and thanks to the digitalization of data, the supplier already knows what the problems are and how to fix them, he enters in a process of continuous improvement. So with this real and reliable information you can go to the customer and tell him that, for example, you claim a problem that is not mine and I can prove it to you or you ask me for a type of action and I can do it because I have the information. Transparency allows you to be sure of what you are doing and when you are sure you are able to give the right service to the customer.

Does transparency improve customer-supplier communication?

Transparency is allowing you to have the information digitized and pass it to the customer so that he can also improve his production process. An example: we have a customer who, before the part leaves the production line, takes a photo, a simple photo, which is available for consultation.

When we finish the process and we see that scratches or defects have appeared, we go to look for the photo and it is confirmed that your part is not the one that has generated the defect. This saves us a lot of time and discussions about whether it is your responsibility or mine or what went wrong. The analysis is much faster, we understand what the real problem is and we do not get lost in discussions, improving the production process from something as simple as a photo.

What challenges do you think there are in effective customer-supplier communication?

We can manufacture parts of maximum complexity and tell the supplier to manufacture them an hour and a half earlier. It is a dynamic process that is very tight, but on the other hand, from the quality point of view, this does not exist, there is no interconnection. We need the processes to be connected from quality so that the customer can use the information to improve and adjust their processes. We could even include artificial intelligence to adapt the processes based on the results we are getting.

To make this possible, as in other areas, the first step is to interconnect dimensional information and quality information to match customer and supplier processes with this data.

But the first step is to digitize the data. Can we say that those who have not done so are late?

The first and fundamental step is to digitize the data. Without that there is nothing. The second step is to organize the data in a visible and reliable way. The third step is to share the data with the customer, who will use the information, and the fourth step is to use the data to feed back into your processes. If we only did the first step, digitizing the data, it would already be useful. You don’t have to go all the way to the end to get clear management benefits.

“If it’s digitized you have all the data and there’s no margin for error.”

Nissan worked with Kapture.io on an R&D project to share information. What were the problems to be solved?

Initially we looked at the need to digitize our supplier communication processes. For example, we had a supplier and we needed data as frequently as possible to see how the production process was going.How was this done? Manually. One operator would look at the data and write it down on a piece of paper. Another would look at it, interpret it, and transfer it to an Excel file, which was mailed to us once a week. At Nissan, someone would receive the mail and re-interpret the data. This process was absolutely manual, error-prone and impractical.

How did Kapture.io software solve it?

The first thing we considered was to digitize the information, without errors, to automatically upload the data to the cloud, generating the graphs and thus having the information available continuously without having to wait for every Monday. This is the most complicated point.

On a technical level, Kapture.io makes it easy, but you need a relationship of trust between customer and supplier because when you share data the supplier knows that the customer will see the real data of their manufacturing. So we agreed that the supplier’s quality manager would be the one to decide what information to share. The natural step would be that, after a certain period of time, the data would be shared automatically.

It is also important to keep in mind that the Kapture.io tool is useful for quality managers to consider as a strategy to use the system in a way that allows them to make a preventive quality, anticipate what problems they may have and make sure that they do not leave home, which is key. And once a problem appears and you find that production has stopped or that the cars manufactured have a problem, having all the information digitized and available gives you a power of analysis that no paper or system that is not interconnected gives you.

What aspect of Kapture.io would you highlight the most?

Until now, most of the time you ended up working intuitively: I think this goes this way or I think that on that date such and such happened. But now you have real data. Sometimes on the paper you don’t have the date or the operator forgot to put the name. If it is digitized you have all the data and there is no margin for error.

Fernando Revilla makes it clear that the digitization of data is an essential first step in quality control and in a transparent and trustworthy communication between the customer and the supplier in order to save time and money.