How Nissan is Working to Improve its Quality
Nissan’s all-new 2015 Murano crossover looks like a winner. It’s stylish, comfortable and drives well, but these aren’t the only feathers in its cap. Quality should be another one of this vehicle’s strong suits.
“As of today the Murano is the best launch that we’ve had in the Americas, period,” said Adam Strean, senior manager of vehicle program management at Nissan. Analyzing things gone wrong during the first three months of ownership he noted, “The previous leader for launch quality was Rogue and we’ve improved on their performance by 25 percent at this point,” though he mentioned they’re likely doing even better than that.
Quality hasn’t necessarily been one of this company’s strong suits. Rivals like Toyota and Honda are consistently lauded for top-notch dependability, but Nissan’s performance has been inconsistent. In fact, Consumer Reports only recommends four of the company’s vehicles, the Frontier, Maxima, Rogue and Versa Note. Additionally several of its products have poor projected reliability.
Of course third-party quality data does not exist at this time because the 2015 Murano just launched but if Nissan’s internal figures are to be believed how did they reach this dependability milestone?
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“What we were trying to achieve with the product launch of Murano was really understanding where we had historically struggled,” said Strean. “We looked at all of that and kind of made some holistic changes with how we do development.”
“By the time we got to the start-of-production phase we were down to so few issues that we actually went to start-of-production without having to make any changes at all.” Strean said this is a first for Nissan North America and possible for the company at large.
To achieve this record-breaking launch Nissan focused on four key areas. They did more digital simulation including the assembly process, they pulled portions of product development ahead to give teams more time, they conducted much more rigorous testing and finally they worked to communicate more effectively, so disparate teams knew what each other were working on.
Automatic transmissions are some of the most complex parts you’ll find in a vehicle today. Whether they’re of the continuously variable variety or feature more traditional stepped ratios they’re a box of headaches when something goes wrong.
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To ensure that customers don’t have issues Nissan exhaustively tested the CVT found in the new Murano. “We actually increased the amount of mileage by 10 times,” said Strean. Typically they test for 100,000 miles, “But in this case we did almost a million miles worth of driving.” They also changed the test cycle to make it more extreme and to include more real-world situations that have caused problems for customers.
“Another area that we, that every company typically has trouble with, is electronics integration,” said Strean. With the 2015 Murano they rigorously tested every single build combination that’s offered, running the electrical system “through the wringer” to prove its quality.
Beyond obvious stuff like taking more time to engineer a vehicle or doing more rigorous evaluation Nissan also worked to improve its manufacturing processes. The Murano is built at the company’s plant in Canton, Mississippi, which hasn’t necessarily been one of their top performers. “Historically the quality of the vehicles coming out of Canton has not been the best for Nissan,” said Strean. “But they’ve turned that around; their view on things is totally different now.”
Hopefully for Nissan these engineering and manufacturing changes result in a higher quality Murano and happier customers. To build on this success they’re turning the lessons they learned into written procedures so future launches can be even better.
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