Quality and reliability through common business environment

Rover Group is the UK’s largest automotive manufacturer employing 35,000 people which designs, develops and manufactures vehicles in the small, medium, executive and specialist four‐wheel‐drive sectors. Describes the processes deployed at Rover to ensure that quality and reliability are designed into the product through the new product introduction process, in order to achieve the company quality strategy milestones. The quality and reliability processes have been developed as a project management framework, known internally as “common business environment”. Describes the product programme milestone philosophy and supporting processes such as design methodology, reliability management, cost management and programme timing synthetics. The processes are deployed into all project teams at Rover Group through a learning methodology called focused learning. Measurement of common business environment implementation is carried out at project Q&R reviews, which are based on the European Foundation for Quality Management self‐assessment criteria.