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In the automotive industry it is perceived a continuous decrease of time for the launches of new vehicles, as well as an increasing of customer expectations that the new launches will not present problems due to lack of manufacturing process adjustments. Besides the investments required for technology updating of manufacturing process it is also necessary to use techniques and work methodologies to help the process parameters optimization. Among the techniques available in the literature, the Design of Experiments (DOE) is a useful tool for product development steps and for product and process improvements. This paper presents the application of DOE as a support tool to improve the manufacturing process of a Driveshaft outboard joint in order to reduce the dimensional variability on its spline. For the case study a generic model for industrial experiments planning and conduction has been followed.

One of the metal-mechanical industry characteristics is to present processes with many steps or operations. It is also known that the product and process quality is a result of the properly adjustment of the operations parameters during the whole production cycle. Nowadays, it is recognized that the quality improvement, when measured as variance of the nominal value (target), is reached more efficiently when the product and process is designed to reduce the variance, and not through usual final inspection. To reduce the variance it is needed to determine optimized operation parameters. When many factors are involved, the optimization becomes a complex task and needs the use of statistical tools. Among the available tools in literature, the Design of Experiments (DOE) is potentially useful in products development stages and in the improvement of existing processes and products.