Your plant serves five OEMs and each one brings its own CSR — one mixed dossier and you lose the approval.

The problem

Five OEMs under the same roof, five different requirement books.

A tier-1 plant never serves a single customer. It stamps for Stellantis in the morning, assembles for VW in the afternoon and squeezes a short run for Renault in between — and each one brings its own book of Customer Specific Requirements on top of IATF 16949:

1. Different control frequencies — Stellantis asks for 1/100, VW demands a continuous SPC control chart, Ford wants a master sample retained per shift. The same press changes regime every time the SKU changes.
2. A PPAP/PSW format per customer — Belegliste for VW, GYS for Ford, SQT for Stellantis. The same data crosses four spreadsheets before it is uploaded to the OEM portal.
3. Technical notes that change mid-campaign — the OEM publishes a revision and the email stays trapped in the quality engineer's inbox. Meanwhile the line keeps producing to the previous version.
4. Zero tolerance for mixing — the automotive quality standard is in the order of 25 PPM^[1]. A part that crossed requirement books between two OEMs is not an incident: it is a rejected PPAP and, sometimes, a Q escalation.

The quality engineer knows it — but cannot be in five portals at once. And when you lose track of which batch answers to which CSR, what breaks is not the part: it is the approval with that customer.

How it fits into the IRIS system

iLEAN Tracer does not add a sixth portal — it seals the cracks between the five books you already manage.

The problem of the multi-customer tier-1 is not a lack of information: it is information living on islands (one portal per OEM, one spreadsheet per engineer, one control sheet per line) that, at the critical moment (a SKU changeover, a technical note on a Friday afternoon), does not reach the decision-maker in time. iLEAN Tracer acts as the filler that closes those gaps, without asking you to change your ERP or your QMS.

Tracer tags every batch with the OEM it is going to. Connect captures the CSR in force from that customer's portal. The agent assembles the PPAP/PSW in the required format. A person signs — the dossier never leaves on its own.

iLEAN Tracer is the piece that combines Connect (capture per channel) and Agents (regulatory cross-check + dossier per customer) applied to tier-1 automotive:

• Connect — captures the CSR in force from the OEM portal (Covisint, SQT, MMOG), the technical note that arrived by email, the frequency change the Stellantis engineer posted this morning. It also captures what the plant produces: the batch recipe in the ERP, OEE from the MES, photos of the old press panel that still is not integrated. All at second zero, with nobody forwarding anything.
• Agents — cross-check the batch recipe, the destination OEM, the CSR version in force for that OEM and the process data. If the next part goes to an OEM with a different control frequency, they apply it to that unit alone. If a technical note leaves a batch in progress out of spec, they hold the shipment and alert the quality engineer through whichever channel they use.
• PPAP/PSW assembly per customer — the agents build the dossier per batch and per OEM in the format that OEM requires (Belegliste, GYS, SQT), with process capabilities, control charts, master samples and authorised deviations. Ready for the customer portal. The engineer reviews and signs.

The three security rings guarantee that the OT network (the presses, the robots) stays isolated: Tracer lives in ring 3, validates in ring 2 and only deposits cryptographically signed data in ring 1 — where a person decides whether to import it.

See the full IRIS architecture →

Before and after

Manual multi-OEM CSR management vs. per-customer segmentation with iLEAN Tracer

Aspect	Manual management (spreadsheets + portals)	With iLEAN Tracer
CSR in force per OEM	The engineer downloads it from the portal and saves it in a folder	Automatic capture at second zero, linked to the batch
SKU changeover between two OEMs	Control sheet and manual signature by the shift leader	Tracer applies the new OEM's CSR to the next unit
Control frequency	A single one for the whole line, the most demanding	Per OEM, per batch — the minimum needed, without over-controlling
Technical change note	Email that arrives when the batch is already running	Immediate capture + hold on the affected batch
PPAP/PSW assembly	Four spreadsheets cross-checked at 10 p.m. by the engineer	Dossier per OEM in its format, automatic, ready to sign
IATF + CSR audit	Rebuilding the history weeks in advance	Traceability per batch, per OEM, per CSR version

Impact estimate

Impact estimate for your plant — to be validated with your numbers.

The block below is an estimate to be validated with the specific data of your plant. We put it forward so the committee has an order of magnitude; we refine it during the diagnostic.

• Tier-1 plant with 3-5 active OEMs, several lines, daily SKU changeovers and at least one PPAP rejected or escalated in recent years because of mixed CSR or broken traceability.
• Tracer pilot on one line + one OEM (CSR capture + batch segmentation + PPAP/PSW assembly). First value expected within a few weeks.
• Indicative payback between 4 and 9 months, depending on the frequency of Q incidents (8D, escalations), the quality engineer's time spent assembling dossiers by hand and the average cost of the last rejected PPAP.
• The hard lever is a single protected approval: losing Ford's Q1 or Stellantis' A rating costs more than the system; freeing up quality engineering time to solve root causes does too.
• Expected reduction in manual PPAP/PSW assembly time of ≥ 30%.

And the quality director's reasonable doubt

«What if the AI mixes two CSR without us noticing?» — hallucination is a problem of free generation, not of anchored tasks. In tasks where the AI merely recontextualises a data point from one system into another (reading the CSR from the portal and applying it to the correct batch), the best models brought the error below 1.5%^[2]. And even then, what is critical is never decided alone: Tracer assembles the dossier and a person signs. The three security rings are there precisely for this.

^[1] Automotive quality standard in the order of 25 PPM. Symestic.

^[2] OpenAI paper «Why Language Models Hallucinate», 2025 — on the reliability of AI in anchored tasks.