Automotive Manufacturing Editing and Proofreading Services

A customer finds a defect and issues a complaint. What comes back is a report in eight numbered sections, and everybody involved knows exactly how it will read: containment was immediate, the root cause was operator error, the operator was retrained, and the action was verified as effective. The customer's quality engineer has read four hundred of these. They can tell in ninety seconds whether anybody actually went and looked.

We edit what automotive suppliers produce — 8D and structured problem-solving reports, customer complaint responses and containment notifications, root cause analysis documentation, corrective and preventive action records, control plan and process documentation updates, production part approval documentation, warranty and field return analysis reports, supplier development and escalation responses, capability and measurement system reporting, layered process audit documentation, and launch readiness and run-at-rate reporting. Our editors work on the report a customer's quality engineer reads sceptically.

The 8D report is where a supplier either demonstrates capability or confirms a suspicion, and its failure is a chain of sections that do not connect. The most common defect is a root cause in D4 that the corrective action in D5 does not address. We work through these so the problem description quantifies what was found and where, with the quantity affected, the dates, the plants and how the boundary was established, since a description without a boundary means containment cannot be assessed; so containment states what was done to material in every location — in the plant, in transit, at the customer, in the field — with quantities and dates, because the location everybody forgets is the one holding the next complaint; so the root cause explains the escape as well as the occurrence, given that a report explaining why a defect was made and not why it got out has answered half the question and the customer will ask the other half; so the corrective action visibly addresses the stated cause, and where the cause is a human action, the action changes something other than the human; so the verification names what evidence shows it worked and over what quantity, rather than asserting effectiveness; so the read-across to similar parts and processes is stated, as this is where a systemic problem is either caught or repeated; and so the dates are real. Reports written this way close complaints rather than starting escalations.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including complaint data, investigations and customer correspondence. We are editors rather than quality engineers, and we offer no view on root cause, containment or corrective action. What we can do is make the eight sections connect to each other.