What is APQP?
7 min read · Updated 2026-08-17
Advanced Product Quality Planning is a structured way of getting a new part into production without discovering its problems in a customer’s assembly plant.
It is not a document. It is a sequence of activities, spread across the life of a launch, each of which produces something specific. The reason it exists is economic: a design problem found on paper costs an afternoon, the same problem found at production launch costs a tooling change, and found in the field it costs a recall. APQP is an attempt to front-load the finding.
The five phases
1. Plan and define the programme
Turn what the customer wants into something engineering can act on. Voice of the customer, design goals, reliability and quality goals, preliminary bill of material, preliminary process flow, and an early list of the characteristics that will matter most. The output that matters most here is agreement about what "good" means.
2. Product design and development
The design takes shape, and the design risk analysis — the DFMEA — happens alongside it rather than after it. Design reviews, prototype builds, drawings and specifications, material specifications, and the first identification of special characteristics. By the end of this phase you should know which features of the part are critical, and why.
3. Process design and development
How the part will actually be made. The process flow diagram, the process FMEA, the control plan, the packaging specification, the measurement system evaluation plan. This is the phase where quality planning does most of its work, and it is where the three documents that must agree with each other — process flow, PFMEA and control plan — are created.
4. Product and process validation
Prove it works before committing. A production trial run, measurement system analysis on the gauges that will be used, initial process capability studies on the significant characteristics, production part approval, and the packaging evaluation. This phase produces most of the evidence a PPAP submission needs.
5. Feedback, assessment and corrective action
After launch: reduced variation, improved customer satisfaction, improved delivery, and lessons learned fed back into the next programme. The phase most often skipped, and the one that decides whether the organisation gets better or just gets busier.
APQP and PPAP are not the same thing
This confusion is common and worth clearing up. APQP is the planning process — the whole sequence above. PPAP is a deliverable within it: the evidence package, produced mainly in phase four, that demonstrates to the customer that you can make the part to specification, repeatably. APQP is the work; PPAP is how you prove the work was done.
Where APQP usually goes wrong
Not in the concept. In the tracking. APQP is almost always managed in a spreadsheet with a row per deliverable and a column per phase, and that spreadsheet knows dates but not documents. It can tell you that the control plan was marked complete on 14 March. It cannot tell you whether the control plan currently in the folder is the revision that was approved, or whether the PFMEA it was derived from has since changed.
That gap is where launches quietly lose control: the plan says the work is done, and the documents say something else. Connecting the activity to the actual document, at a revision, is what closes it.
Reading further
The authoritative reference is the AIAG APQP manual, which is licensed material — worth having if you work in automotive supply. This article is a plain-language explanation, not a substitute for it.