The first UK Automotive Quality Forum (UK AQF) an event hosted by Pound Gates Vehicle Management Services was held on September 2nd 2009 with an excellent attendance of senior level quality & operational management figures representing both OEM’s and LSP’s.

Mark Morgan (Executive Director) of the ECG opened the forum with a presentation providing background to the ECG’s own work in this area and illustrating the importance of the UK AQF as a vehicle to support efforts to reduce costs from transit damage and improve brand quality.

This was followed by a rigorous agenda discussing a wide range of logistics quality issues not least including a session on performance benchmarking which focused on using Key Performance Indicators as strategic tools for those involved in automotive logistics to identify areas of improvement in the way vehicles are handled in the transport chain.

Pound Gates believe that hosting this forum as part of its package of activities in the market is paramount to having a means to continually appraise and increase its understanding of OEM’s & LSP’s needs and therefore be in a position to implement solutions on their behalf.

“It was clear from the forum that a policy of proactive prevention is better than reactively trying to find cures and by identifying potential risks for our clients we can reduce their exposure to the costs inherent in dealing with transit damage” said Richard Shirley, Pound Gates’ Business Development Manager. “It is because of this that we are continuing to evolve our Quality Auditing (QA) service proposition. We recognise that OEM’s and their suppliers have a mutual interest here and securing independently assessed information about how each stage in the logistics process is working is crucial in identifying the risks to product quality.”

Pound Gates are filling a service gap by taking their QA services onto a more developed platform. “The ability to create bespoke operational auditing projects and capture findings electronically have been long awaited features in the industry” says Richard Shirley. “We will be using our PGVISon data capture system which has successfully been used in vehicle inspections since 2006 to provide the flexibility and transparency that OEM’s, LSP’s and carriers all demand.”

The QA services package is built on a modular structure designed with stakeholders individual qualitative targets as its core. The modules act autonomously or in combination cover all modes of transportation & storage: Road (Transporter Audits), Rail (Carriage Audits), Maritime (Vessel Audits) and Compound & Storage (Vehicle Condition Audits).

“We identified that a one size suits all policy which has been utilised in the past is no longer an effective way of pursuing quality control as an integral part of logistics service delivery. The old paper ticking boxes method of auditing is a lengthy & inefficient way of securing point of audit data. The data when collated is unwieldy to manage and difficult to use in benchmarking within operations and across comparable operations “

Using electronic captured data allows increased flexibility to Pound Gates’ clients in the ways in which data can be transmitted, analysed and used to identify trends that will assist driving down transit damage costs. Using PGVISion Pound Gates are able to design individual audit formats that drill down to the root causes and through the data captured pin point areas of risk within operations with accuracy and efficiency.