APQP & geometrical management supporting entry into service

Abstract

Geometrical Management of Key Characteristics (KC) starts with System Engineering and continues with functional analysis of the vehicle during the development phase. As next APQP (Advanced Product Quality Planning), focusing on industrial maturity and repeatability during the industrialization phase is performed and finally, the process ends with a control plan, which is deployed after entry into service for the serial life of the product. This is a top-down approach leading to systems specification during the three main phases of the Helicopter lifecycle: • Design development, • Industrialization (MAP - Industrial Process Improvement) • Serial life During Industrialization, we focus on the demonstration of process robustness considering system requirements and program specifications. It includes process definition and requires product/process optimization (MAP) a Specification Verification phase. During Serial life, we shall provide optimized methods and tools matching with quality and production objectives (OTD, OQM, ramp-up) and viewing results format. Since the tolerances are represented by a network, we have defined a format for injecting the results at a given level as input data to the next level. Due to the nature and interconnections of this network, the volume of data to be processed can be significant. So we have implemented an appropriate numerical technique to deal with a continuous influx of measurement data. The objective was to propose a comprehensible representation of the re-evaluated risks at each stage of the process, i.e.: - Initial risks related to the current helicopter definition - Re-evaluated risks related to an aircraft serial number completed with each new measurement of characteristics for this aircraft. - Re-evaluated risks related to the observed variability of the product/process. The aim of this paper is to present the geometrical risk evaluation at each step of the development for preparation to H/C EIS (Entry Into Service) phase, which is also called “Ramp-up” phase, based on one system example: A cockpit door integration.