Abstract
Original Equipment Manufacturers such as Ford, Toyota and GM usually have good quality control of the manufacture of their product which is often exemplary. As a result its product is of good quality but relatively expensive. The competition (big part of which is based in Asia) has seen its chances and many of OE manufactured products are now copied in a method often referred to as ‘reverse engineered’ product. This product often looks better and in many cases it achieves and performs well and it tends to be less expensive and therefore it finds buyers. Some of this product is used as aftermarket i.e. this product replaces the genuine part when the genuine parts has broken down on a vehicle. Some of those copy products are used by smaller OE manufacturers as genuine part on new vehicles. The data presented in this paper is collected from a large Australian based automotive wholesaler with over 60,000 different automotive products. This wholesaler sells OE manufactured and also non-OE manufactured i.e. copy products. This gives a good overview as to how OE manufactured product compares to product that was made away from OE manufacturer’s Quality Control techniques. Data collected for 30 different products shows the amount of sold OEM product as well as sales of non-OEM same type of product. Also included are warranties resulting from those sales and grouped as OEM and non-OEM in order to make comparisons. Six different failures were analysed showing the difference between the OE manufactured and non-OE manufactured product. A suggestion was offered in order to improve the undesirable performance of the non-OE manufactured product and bring the warranty down to a more acceptable 0.33 % of a total sold product, which is a warranty rate accepted by this industry.
Keywords: OE manufactured, reverse engineered non-OE manufactured, warranty data, improvement of reverse engineered product