What Actually Does PPM Mean?
Maybe some of you already heard the abbreviation “PPM”. For all who don’t know, “PPM” means “parts per million”. PPM is in the automotive industry an established KPI (Key Performance Indicator) to measure your quality performance. 1PPM means that you got 1 defect within 1 million parts produced. Why don’t we measure 1 defect among 1000 parts produced, you may ask? The reason is, that a single defect in the vehicle can lead to the failure of the whole vehicle. Just imagine that you are driving on the highway, a component fails and causes an accident!
The PPM information sheet
To highlight the importance of PPM and to enhance the understanding, you can find a “PPM cylinder” with an illustrated explanation in our plant in Bebra . The “PPM cylinder” contains 1 million white stones and 3 black stones. After 2 minutes, I finally found all 3 “defective components”. A small piece could have a big influence.
If you want to know more about engineers at Continental please visit our career homepage.
This article was written by our employee.
Xinhuan Wang
