PPAP: the submission package and what gets it rejected

PPAP — the production part approval process — is how a supplier demonstrates to a customer that it has understood the requirements for a part and that its production process can make that part consistently. It originated in the automotive industry and is now used well beyond it, and it produces a package of documents submitted for approval before production shipments begin.

The package is the visible part; the discipline behind it is the point. A PPAP asserts that the parts submitted were made on production tooling, at production rate, by the production process — not carefully by hand in a laboratory. A submission that quietly breaks that assumption is the one that produces a capacity failure three months later.

What a PPAP package contains

• Design records and any authorised engineering changes, at the revision the customer expects.
• Customer engineering approval where required.
• Design and process FMEA, and the process flow diagram.
• The control plan, consistent with the process FMEA.
• Measurement system analysis studies for the gauges used.
• Dimensional results, with every characteristic on the drawing accounted for.
• Material and performance test results.
• Initial process studies — capability on the significant characteristics.
• Qualified laboratory documentation for the measurements and tests.
• Appearance approval report where the part has appearance requirements.
• Sample production parts, a master sample, and checking aids.
• Customer-specific requirements, which are where most surprises live.
• The part submission warrant, signed, which is the cover sheet asserting all of the above.

Levels decide what you actually send

There are five submission levels, and they differ in how much of the package goes to the customer rather than in how much you have to have. Level three is the common default; level one sends only the warrant and appearance approval; level five is a review at your site. The mistake worth avoiding is assuming the level determines the work: at every level the full evidence must exist and be retrievable, and a customer can ask for any of it. Confirm the level and the customer-specific requirements in writing before assembling anything — they sit outside your own quality management system and are the commonest source of surprises.

Consistency across documents is what reviewers actually check. The drawing revision on the warrant, on the dimensional results and on the control plan must match; the characteristics on the control plan must match the process FMEA; the gauge in the measurement study must be the one used for the dimensional results. Most rejections are internal contradictions, not bad parts.

When a resubmission is required

A PPAP is not a one-off. Notification and often resubmission are required for changes to the design, the process, the tooling, the material, the supplier of a component, or the manufacturing location — and for a production restart after a long inactivity. Suppliers get into trouble by treating a change as minor and deciding for themselves; the customer defines what is minor, and the cost of asking is a fraction of the cost of an unapproved change discovered at a warranty investigation.

Keeping the package assemblable

The suffering in a PPAP is assembly: eighteen elements produced by different people at different times, each of which must agree with the others. Ettex Records holds the package per part number and revision with every element attached and its date, Ettex Sheets carries the dimensional results and the capability studies, and the analysis behind it is the fmea that the control plan is built from — the two documents reviewers compare first.

Plainly: this is a record file, not PPAP software. There is no warrant template, no customer portal submission and no automatic consistency check between elements. Where your customer specifies a system, use theirs.