Automotive quality and safety is about more than simply complying with regulatory requirements. It's about maintaining consumer confidence, ensuring a competitive supply chain, and enabling profitable growth.

SAP solutions for governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) support the automotive industry's requirements to predict and prevent financial and environmental risks, increase business performance, and drive competitive advantage. To meet these objectives and ensure corporate sustainability, SAP solutions for GRC unify corporate strategy, risk management, and control initiatives across the extended enterprise.

SAP solutions enable compliance with key automotive regulations such as the Transportation Recall Enhancement, Accountability, and Documentation (TREAD) Act and ISO/TS 16949.

TREAD

The TREAD Act requires greater problem visibility, control, and traceability of safety-related automotive components. The objective is to protect lives by detecting failure patterns in automotive components. Current regulation requires reporting in two focus areas by both the vehicle manufacturer and supplier communities. One focus area is the collection of data involving production, consumer complaints, property damage claims, warranty claims, and field reports. The other involves data on allegations of death or injury. TREAD reporting involves the collection and submission of large quantities of structured and unstructured data, requiring integration with legacy and transaction systems for NHTSA management and analysis.

SAP addresses these requirements through the SAP NetWeaver platform. SAP NetWeaver supports governance and accountability through easy access to data for reporting and analysis, plus clear audit trails for critical quality, procurement, and dealer management systems.

ISO/TS 16949

This specification aligns international automotive quality standards, defining quality-system requirements for the design, production, installation, and servicing of automotive products. The emphasis is on ensuring that both parts and processes meet customer requirements. This process approach to quality focuses on customer satisfaction rather than just documentation, and requires that suppliers show the end-to-end interactions of processes, including inputs, outputs, and overall effectiveness. A growing number of automakers now require or soon will demand compliance with ISO/TS 16949.

SAP addresses these requirements through the quality management and new product development and introduction (NPDI) capabilities of SAP Product Lifecycle Management (SAP PLM). SAP PLM supports collaborative product-development processes, including Advanced Product Quality Planning (APQP), for both OEMs and suppliers.

With SAP solutions, OEMs and suppliers can achieve their quality objectives of zero defects and safety incidents, while OEMs, suppliers, and dealers can reduce warranty costs and ensure that vehicles are safer and cheaper to drive.