Tofaş received the second highest score in the 2022 round of the Stellantis Group’s annual assessment of its factories’ performance on the sustainable-quality front.

Seeking to directly understand its customers’ quality expectations, Tofaş strives to raise the quality of its manufacturing and service processes and to maximize its quality competitiveness throughout its value-creation chain. The company’s quality management system is regularly updated and improved in light of changes in customers’ expectations.

In line with its customer satisfaction-centric sustainable quality approach, Tofaş strives to improve its quality indicators consistently every year. As a result of its efforts in this direction, Tofaş received the second highest score in the 2022 round of the Stellantis Group’s annual assessment of its factories’ performance on the sustainable-quality front.

For the 2022 survey and review, Stellantis published a new standard in which customer-assessment criteria were made uniform throughout the entire group. As a result of the huge improvement in its customer-assessed quality metric last year, Tofaş emerged from the year’s evaluation as one of the top performers across the entire Stellantis ecosystem.

Under a new testing standard introduced in 2022, upon leaving the factory all vehicles are subjected to short-track testing under conditions that mimic average-customer use. By ensuring that only defect-free vehicles are supplied to customers, this practice increases customer satisfaction. According to the results of independently-conducted new car buyer surveys, in 2022 the Fiat Egea’s sedan and wagon models ranked in the top quartile with the highest quality scores.

A 2022 upgrade to the highest currently-available level in the next-generation Statistical Process Control (SPC) system used at the plant has significantly speeded up measurement processes and resulted in a doubling of the frequency with which vehicle bodies are measured. Measurements by multiple coordinate measurement machines (CMM) now require only a single SPC unit. The ability to examine body-scan results in real time also increases diagnostic capabilities.

In 2022 Tofaş underwent and successfully passed the second interim review audits of its integrated ISO 9001:2015, ISO 14001:2015, and ISO 45001:2018 standard certifications without any instances of nonconformity being reported.

The results of these audits show that Tofaş is especially strong in the following areas:

• Taking and following up corrective action to deal with integrated quality management system nonconformities
• System handling and management processes
• On-site work-safety practices
• Regulatory applications
• Coordinated, simultaneous conduct of multiple projects
• Compliance with Stellantis-mandated requirements
• Tracking and acting upon key performance indicators.

Successfully undergoing and passing the conformity of production audit conducted by the Italian transportation ministry in 2022, Tofaş’s certificate of conformity has been renewed for another three years. Ministry representatives conducting the audit said they were impressed by how the notion of quality from an end-user’s perspective had been incorporated into all of the plants processes and options.

In 2022 Tofaş’s quality department organized six on-campus meetings under the company’s university-industry collaboration program. During these meetings, students and newly-hired employees were provided with information about Tofaş’s automotive industry, worklife, quality, digitalization, and industrialization processes, knowledge, and experience.