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Statistical process control (SPC) has been extensively used in many different industries including automotive, electronics, and aerospace, among others. SPC tools such as control charts, process capability analysis, sampling inspection, etc., have definitive and powerful impact on quality control and improvement for mass production and similar production systems. In aerospace manufacturing, however, applications of SPC tools are more challenging, especially when these tools are implemented in processes producing products of large sizes with slower production rates. For instance, following a widely accepted rule-of-thumb, about 100 units of products are required in the first phase of implementing a Shewhart type control chart. Once established, it then can be used for process control in the second phase for actual production process monitoring and control.

Design for assembly (DFA) is a prominent strategy for manufacturing cost reduction in automotive industries. DFA in automotive component design is a complicated process since several competing targets have to be considered simultaneously in designing various functions and features. It requires specialized design knowledge as well as extensive quantitative analysis, comparison and evaluation. Analytical Hierarchic Process (AHP) is one of the tools that can assist such design and evaluation processes. It has been successfully applied in various processes when multiple competing goals and characteristics are involved. In this paper, we propose the application of AHP for DFA in automotive component design and present a case study involving car front end component design.

Manufacturing industries have implemented design for manufacturing and design for assembly guidelines and techniques for many years. These lead to better designed products and lower manufacturing and assembly costs. In recent years, due to environmental and economical reasons, there is a growing interest in developing effective methods for product design considering product disassembly, component remanufacturing and material recovery. As a result of which numerous design guidelines for disassembly and algorithms for disassembly sequence generation are proposed. However, only a handful research articles presented integrated approaches to design for assembly and disassembly. In this paper, an integrated method is proposed to analyze the ease of assembly and disassembly using analytic hierarchic process (AHP) approach.