In the high-stakes world of automotive manufacturing, delivering consistent quality at scale isn’t just a competitive differentiator—it’s a necessity. With a customer base that includes the biggest names in the automotive industry, from Ford and General Motors to Rivian and Tesla, Autokiniton understands that precision, safety and regulatory compliance are non-negotiable.
Autokiniton is the second-largest Body-in-White and vehicle-frame supplier in North America and a vertically integrated powerhouse. With more than 8.3 million square feet of manufacturing floor space and operations across the U.S., Brazil, Mexico and India, the company needed a cohesive, standardized approach to quality management to support its rapid growth and evolving customer expectations.
To meet these demands, Autokiniton turned to QAD EQMS (Enterprise Quality Management System), a solution it’s trusted for over two decades, to streamline its quality processes, reinforce compliance and enable enterprise-wide visibility.
Growth, Regulations and the Rising Need for Standardization
Autokiniton has long been a pioneer in adopting automotive quality standards like QS9000, ISO 9001, TS-16949 and IATF 16949. But over time, growth through strategic acquisitions of Tier 1 suppliers—such as L&W Engineering and Tower International—brought new complexities. Each acquired facility had its own processes for managing quality, which created inconsistency and inefficiencies.
Meanwhile, major customers began issuing more stringent mandates, requiring suppliers to link control plans to Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) documentation and base those on foundational process knowledge. That left Autokiniton with a clear mandate: unify its quality practices, create a shared knowledge base and scale its systems to meet new requirements across a global operation.
“Customers came out and said, ‘Hey, this is no longer an option. It’s a requirement,” explained Andrew Amstutz, Vice President of IT at Autokiniton.
Key Challenges Faced by Autokiniton
- Growth through M&A introduced diverse, disconnected quality processes across facilities.
- Increasingly complex customer-specific requirements (CSR) necessitated tighter control and documentation.
- Manual or inconsistent FMEA development slowed down product launches and increased risk.
- Lack of standardized libraries created inefficiencies and knowledge silos.
- Regulatory compliance and customer audits became more difficult without centralized visibility.
A Foundation for the Future with QAD EQMS
Autokiniton wasn’t new to QAD EQMS. In fact, it had implemented EQMS in 2001. The manufacturer had also been a longstanding QAD ERP customer since the 1990s and moved its ERP operations from on-premise to the QAD Cloud in 2014. So when the time came to evolve its quality systems, it didn’t start from scratch—it built upon a trusted foundation.
By leveraging QAD EQMS capabilities, Autokiniton embarked on a strategic initiative to standardize process libraries for both FMEAs and control plans. This allowed the company to unify its global operations, ensure compliance with increasingly strict automotive requirements and accelerate time-to-quality for new programs.
“Library standards give us a definition across the organization. For example, if we define how to control a spot welding process, we can use that definition across the organization in a very standard way, regardless of what product we’re producing,” said Amstutz.
Autokiniton also took advantage of the flexible app extensions within QAD EQMS to tailor approval workflows—such as requiring engineering and quality manager signoffs—without compromising upgrade paths or adding technical debt.
Standardization as a Strategic Advantage
In the automotive industry, precision matters. A single defect can impact thousands of vehicles. That’s why Autokiniton took a proactive approach by building comprehensive foundational FMEAs and control plans to minimize the risk of defects and build quality from the start.
“If you do the same thing over and over and over again, eventually you miss something. Foundational libraries ensure that the knowledge we have for all our processes is utilized on every single product we implement,” explained Andrew Amstutz.
This approach also helps Autokiniton protect institutional knowledge as experienced employees retire or transition. By formalizing their process expertise within QAD EQMS, Autokiniton ensures that future teams have access to the same knowledge and best practices.
A Partnership Built on Innovation and Trust
Autokiniton’s long-standing relationship with QAD EQMS has grown stronger over the years. The company actively collaborates with the QAD product management team to shape the future of the platform, recently helping prioritize the introduction of a tree view for FMEAs—an innovation that makes it easier to visualize and manage complex risk structures.
“The ability to understand that within a tree view and how things are related together really helps our team understand how to not only use the software, but also the data it provides,” said Amstutz.
With an eye on the future, Autokiniton remains confident in the ability of QAD EQMS to support its evolving needs, drive digital transformation and maintain its leadership in the automotive supply space: “I’m very confident that QAD EQMS is going to help us meet future industry standards,” said Amstutz.
Benefits: How QAD EQMS Drove Strategic and Operational Gains for Autokiniton
By standardizing its quality processes and leveraging QAD EQMS across a growing, global footprint, Autokiniton realized significant operational and strategic advantages:
- Enterprise-wide standardization of FMEAs and control plans enabled alignment across facilities and newly acquired companies.
- Increased efficiency through the use of foundational libraries that reduced duplication and manual effort.
- Reduced analysis fatigue by using a foundational library that includes all known risks, allowing the team to focus only on the aspects of the FMEA that differ from the established knowledge.
- Faster onboarding of new sites and teams using centralized, proven quality templates.
- Improved compliance with customer-specific requirements, including mandates from Ford and other major OEMs.
- Preservation of institutional knowledge via process libraries that capture and retain critical quality insights.
- Greater risk mitigation through proactive quality control embedded in standardized workflows.
- Seamless integration with QAD ERP, enabling a unified system of record for items, customers and suppliers.
- Enhanced visibility and usability of quality data, including tree-view functionality for navigating FMEA relationships.
- Flexibility and scalability with app extensions that allow tailored workflows without compromising core functionality.
- Strong partnership with QAD, including collaborative product development and ongoing alignment on future functionality.
Accelerating Toward a Standardized, Quality-Driven Future
Autokiniton’s story is proof that in today’s dynamic automotive landscape, success isn’t just about scale—it’s about consistency, foresight and the ability to respond quickly to change. With QAD EQMS, Autokiniton isn’t just keeping pace with customer and regulatory demands—it’s setting the standard for what quality can and should look like in the automotive sector.
If your organization is facing similar challenges—whether it’s standardization across facilities, meeting complex compliance requirements or preserving process knowledge—choosing the right EQMS is essential, and QAD EQMS can help you shift from reactive to proactive quality management.
Learn more about how Autokiniton and other leading manufacturers are using QAD EQMS to build better products, faster. Read the full Autokiniton EQMS customer success story to learn more, and check out our customer success video with Autokiniton below.
