Director Customer Quality

Responsibilities

Role Overview

The Customer Quality Leader will be responsible for driving customer satisfaction through proactive quality leadership across existing customers in Japan. This role will serve as the central escalation interface for customer quality concerns, lead a customer quality team to drive cross-functional problem-solving, and manage quality program execution through safe launch. The ideal candidate will foster a culture of quality excellence, collaborate with OEMs, and ensure seamless integration of quality processes across engineering, manufacturing, and supplier ecosystems.

Key Objectives of this Role:

•Manage customer quality scorecards, and ensure timely, accurate communication of quality data and reports.

•Develop and maintain Customer Quality Roadmaps aligned with strategic goals to meet performance indicators.

•Drive program-level quality management engineering, plant teams and suppliers to resolve quality issues and implement corrective actions.

•Build and maintain strong OEM relationships at senior management level to develop intimacy level that helps achieve quality targets and customer satisfaction. This includes negotiation of responsibility and cost sharing with OEMs, together with commercial team.

•Represent the company in customer management meetings, audits, and quality reviews.

•Lead and develop the Customer Quality team, promoting a culture of continuous improvement and customer focus.

•Ensure compliance with Customer Specific Requirements (CSR) across all quality and production steps.

•Support change management and validation processes to maintain product integrity and reliability.

Key Performance Indicators:

•Customer Scorecard ratings: Drive organization to meet customer 0KM, Warranty

•Quality Concern Responsiveness: Drive his team to meet 8D customer time closure expectations

•Financials: Manage financial impact of quality issues with respective internal departments to avoid any last-minute financial surprises.

Key Year One Deliverables:

Customer Engagement Framework:

Implement structured collaboration with OEMs to define expectations, engagement plan and proactively manage containment and permanent / preventive actions, improving CSS by 10%.

Data-Driven Quality Program:

Deploy analytics tools to identify trends and root causes, improving quality initiative effectiveness by 25%.

Issue Resolution Time:

Reduce average resolution time by 20% within the first year.

Reporting Structure:

Direct report to APAC Customer Quality Vice President. India customer quality managers and resident engineers are direct reports.

Qualification, Experience and Skills:

•Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Business Management, or related technical field.

•Minimum 15+ years of experience in automotive product delivery or/and quality management, preferably in a global or regional role.

•Proven experience in program management and customer-facing quality roles.

•Strong knowledge of automotive manufacturing, software development, and customer quality requirements.

•Proficiency in quality tools: FTA/Fishbone, APQP, PPAP, DFMEA, FMEA, MSA, SPC, Six Sigma.

•Preferred: Experience with QMS standards: ISO 9001, IATF 16949, ASPICE, ISO 26262.

•Excellent leadership, communication, and stakeholder management skills.

•Fluent in English and Japanese