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1. Introduction
With increasing fierce competition on the automotive industry around the world, excellent quality and customer-oriented strategy become the competences of auto factories and continuous quality improvement programs tend to be drivers that increase successes and reduce failures (Bhuiyan and Baghel, 2005; Donauer et al., 2014). The Chinese domestic auto factory shows soaring interests on quality improvement activities and continuous improvement methodologies on products and production processes (Bilgen and Şen, 2012; Zhou, Wang, Lin, He and Zhou, 2016), which leads to positive advantages on business competitive position and customer satisfaction (Sharma and Gadenne, 2008). Quality practices based on Six Sigma, 8D, total quality management (TQM) and other quality management techniques are employed and developed by researchers and practitioners to promote product performance, service quality and brand reputation (Talib et al., 2011; Kumar et al., 2009). The concentration of customers’ feedback becomes valuable references to stimulate quality improvement initiatives (Putri and Yusof, 2008), especially within the warranty period (Zuo et al., 2000; Murthy and Blischke, 2006). Automotive industries that can convert unconformity and deficiency to success by learning from past experience through quality improvement pilot program will be the triumphs and pioneers.
Quality is a term that has a variety of specific definitions and can be reflected by utilization information and client’ feedback. Managerial decisions, before product delivery including procurement, technological level and assembly abilities, contribute to product performance. It is un-conformance and imperfect performance reflected by the warranty system that stimulates the continuous improvement by quality pilot programs (Donauer et al., 2014). Generally, the quality indexes like R/1000 and TGW/1000 in Chinese and Indian auto industries have been established to describe and reflect quality performances of part, subsystem and vehicle (Teli et al., 2013; Fuli et al., 2015), which have been employed by quality managers to scrutinize and evaluate the consequents of quality initiatives and pilot programs. In addition, roadmap performance of the crucial quality indicators can reflect the quality variation and improvement result which provide some operational guidance for managers to perform quality activities.
In order to apply continuous improvement with high efficiency, domestic auto industries in China target the non-conformity, and deficient part or system as pilot program to perform quality practices by Pareto chart...