This Thesis is a study from within Ford Motor Company on the design and manufacturing organisations ability to deliver 'Right First Time Production Release'.

Within any vehicle manufacturing company the main function of the Product Development (PD) organisation is to engineer products, which downstream divisions can procure and make parts that will assemble together to make a vehicle. The information on the product is communicated from PD to the downstream activities via the Production Release. In the ideal world once the Production Release is issued there should be no further changes required. However, in reality there are a number of re-release actions required between the initial Production Release and the first production vehicle being available for sale.

The aim of this research was to understand the issues relating to the Production Release and associated processes.

The literature review researched topics associated with the release process including Project Management, Gateways, Performance Measures, Definition of Quality, Systems Engineering Methodologies, Design Evolution, Engineering Change Management, Engineering Quality Tools and Benchmarking.

The thesis therefore studies the number of times parts are typically re-released during the PD cycle. A case study approach was adopted using the recently launched Fiesta (code named B256) to gather real data on how many times parts are re-released. The information on number of release actions is all stored within the Worldwide Engineering Release System (WERS).

This was followed by an in-depth analysis concentrating on the release actions by Body Engineering during the <CP> to <CC> part of the PD cycle. Body Engineering was selected because they had the largest percentage of parts and had a mixture of 'in-house' (body stamping) and externally sourced (Instrument panel, Bumpers and Seats) parts. The data was analysed in a number of different ways looking for trends and root causes. A benchmarking study of similar organisations (namely Mazda) was conducted to compare the FPDS against MPDS (Mazda Product Development Process) to identify where differences (and potential improvements) exist within the process steps relating to the release activities.

Through the case study approach the aim of the research was met. The discussion and conclusions generated from the case study and benchmarking analysis suggest there are a number of opportunities available to the company to improve their release performance. These include improvements to the quality of data within the Production Release and revisions to the process steps, which support the subsequent verification and tooling time spans. The research identifies shortfalls with the design verification process due to the number re-release actions.