Assistant General Manager of Quality, Enkei America, Inc.

My name's Austin. I'm the Quality Manager for NK America. I oversee process quality and laboratory validation. So I work for NK America. We make aluminum OEM wheels for Honda, Nissan, and Subaru. So we cast, machine, paint, and finish aluminum wheels. We have a fairly-large plant. We have 22 casting lines as well as a full-on paint process and a design center, which we're one of four of our, I believe, 16 facilities that actually has a design center for R and D. So I am the Process Quality and Lab Manager, so from an AIAG PPAP kind of direction, so it starts with development. We develop our products, and I make sure that the lab is doing all the right development testing, interacting with our design group and our engineering group to make sure that we're meeting and exceeding customer expectations, both from a testing specification standpoint, but also from just a design standpoint. From there, because of my role, I'll take it from development into the mass-production phase, which is the process quality side. So I gotta make sure that in our process, we're making not only safe products that are functionally safe; but because they're wheels, they have to be jewelry as well. So we have to make sure that they meet all the cosmetic expectations as well. So once it goes from the lab approval phase, so we send out our validation report to our engineering and development group. They review all that, and they are the keepers of the approval, essentially say that this new product is okay for mass production. At that point, we hold a meeting with a huge cross-functional team that goes from our production management, what we call our RDT team, which is reject-down team. They're essentially our advance floor engineers as well as all of our process quality engineers. And we review what happened during the development phase. We look at what steps we need to take to either make some improvements going towards mass pro, or if we're ready for launch. And at that time, we just set dates. We make sure that we have people on the floor ready to watch what we call our mass pro launch, and just make sure that we have good product flowing through the system.