The quality of our products and services plays a key role in maintaining customer satisfaction. Customers are particularly satisfied and loyal when their expectations of a product or service are met or even exceeded. Appeal, reliability and service determine quality as it is perceived by the customer throughout the entire product experience. Our objective is to positively surprise our customers and fill them with enthusiasm in all areas, and thus to win them over with our outstanding quality.
We embody outstanding quality and ensure dependable mobility for our customers worldwide – this is the strategic goal that guides the work of Group Quality Management. Group Quality Management and the brands’ quality organizations play an active role at all stages of product emergence and testing, making an important contribution to successful product launches, high customer satisfaction and low warranty and goodwill costs.
In consultation with the brands, we developed the Group Quality Management strategy as part of our future program TOGETHER – Strategy 2025. Focal areas include digitalization, new technologies and business fields, as well as uniform processes, methods and standards at all brands.
Advancing digitalization is also a major challenge for the Volkswagen Group: an ever increasing number of digital products and services is being developed and brought to market. To continue to ensure our customary level of quality and safety amid this diversity, we must adapt our quality measures accordingly. For example, the increased functional diversity and complexity of the driver assistance systems, extending all the way to autonomous vehicles, means that the software is also growing in scope. We have therefore introduced the processes and structures of what are known as smart quality organizations in the Group and the brands, completing this in the reporting period. Among other things, smart quality organizations refine the methods we use to support the development of software for selected critical features, and with which we can ensure that quality requirements are met. At the same time, we are taking advantage of the progress in digital technology to further optimize our existing processes and structures. For example, we use virtual measurement technologies or big data analyses when vehicles on the market encounter quality problems.
The strategy of Group Quality Management developed in this context comprises the following four goals:
To achieve our goals, we are working on a variety of quality initiatives. All are focused on the topics that are decisive to the success of the quality organizations in the Volkswagen Group.
We use a strategic indicator to measure the contribution of Quality Management in the major passenger car-producing brands.
We also use a strategic indicator to measure our success in the truck and bus area:
The legal and regulatory compliance of our products is paramount in our work. We have further reinforced application of the principle of multiple-party verification – which involves mutual support and control between the divisions – and introduced additional important processes, including in software security. With effect from the reporting period, software development is accompanied by quality milestones at all brands, whereby all systems, components and parts that directly influence a vehicle’s safety, type approval and functioning and therefore require particular vigilance are safeguarded through multiple-party verification. At the series production stage, we are also ensuring even more stringently than before that the conformity checks on our products are carried out and assessed with the participation of all business units involved. This applies particularly to emissions and fuel consumption.
We are also placing even greater emphasis on our quality management system than before, reinforcing the process-driven approach Group-wide across all business areas. Quality management in the Volkswagen Group is based on the ISO 9001 standard, which was revised in 2015: the requirements of this standard must be met to obtain the type approval needed to produce and sell our vehicles. We conducted numerous system audits in the reporting period to verify that our locations and brands comply with the requirements of the standard. Particular focus was placed on assessing the risk of non-compliance with defined processes. Our quality management consultants pay attention to ensuring that these and other new requirements, as well as official regulations are implemented and complied with; they are supported in this endeavor by Group Quality Management.
With these and other measures, Group Quality Management is helping to ensure that we as a manufacturer meet the legal requirements, and that our products do so, too.
Our customers in the different regions of the world have very diverse needs as far as new vehicle models are concerned. Another important task of Group Quality Management is therefore to identify and prioritize these regional factors so that they can be reflected in the development of new products and the production of established vehicle models – together with other important criteria such as the quality of locally available fuel, road conditions, traffic density, country-specific usage patterns and, last but not least, local legislation. We mainly use market studies and customer surveys to determine region-specific customer requirements.
To ensure that the perceived quality of our vehicles is at a level commensurate with that of our competitors, we already realigned our vehicle audit back in 2017 and tailored it more closely to regional customer needs. Every brand works together with the individual regions to decide how its product is to be positioned there. This enables us to strengthen the responsibility of the brands and invest less in features that do not resonate with customers. To ensure that the audit returns comparable results, consistent quality benchmarks apply across all markets and regions. We are continually adapting these to changing requirements. For more than 40 years now, we have been deploying auditors around the world to assess from the customer’s perspective the vehicles that are ready for delivery and to ensure that these vehicles comply with the benchmarks defined.