Jaguar's approach to dimensional control in product development

Ask the chief executive of any car company you care to mention "What is your greatest priority?" and the chances are the reply will be "Quality". This will almost certainly be the reply if the company has had a poor reputation for quality in the past. The reasoning is fairly simple, bad quality hits the bottom line. It reduces current and future sales revenues and leads to high warranty costs which eat straight into any profit the company might make. For this reason, serious effort has been applied over the past 10-15 years to improve the quality of car production. One element of producing a quality vehicle is control of dimensional variation. This paper outlines how Jaguar is addressing this issue from concept though to production and beyond.