The NGK Group provides high quality, reliable products to its customers.
General Manager,
Quality Management Dept.
Satoshi Kaneko
In recent years, products incorporating functional ceramics have assumed greater weight among the NGK Group’s range of products. This situation is prompting the need to incorporate adequate quality assurance from the initial design stages, taking into account how these products are actually being used and the associated risks.
To meet this challenge, we are moving to thoroughly eliminate risks from quality defects by bringing together NGK’s manufacturing-side perspective with issues from the customer’s standpoint, then implementing a definitive process that lays out a clear checklist of important quality-related items for our products.
In fiscal 2010, the Company-wide Quality Committee began carrying activities forward under the newly established Quality Management Department. The aim of these eff orts is to first rate product reliability by accurately capturing needs pertaining to product usage by customers and their expectations. The next step is to briskly promote Company-wide quality initiatives by refl ecting those needs in product design. We established a new Company-wide Quality Council and held a Company-wide design review (DR) conducted by our in-house engineers that will enable quality to be evaluated from a third-party perspective. Important quality issues are examined from an expert standpoint, together with more robust debate than ever from an objective viewpoint that is also closer to customers. The result is a multifaceted system of checks to determine whether customers will be satisfied with the level of quality. The level of DR that takes place in each business group is also being improved through a stronger awareness of the customer’s perspective.
Education is vital to bolstering and promoting company - wide quality initiatives. In fiscal 2010, we concentrated on various quality education eff orts, including reconfirming risk analysis techniques and other fundamental knowledge among young design engineers, and offering individualized practical guidance built on practical risk prevention training. In fiscal 2011, the Head Office and each business group will advance efforts to develop human resources that not only know DR around specialized technologies, but possess a wide range of knowledge and the capacity to evaluate and analyze quality from the customer’s perspective.
Along with vigorous discussion of quality going for-ward, the NGK Group will strive to meet the trust and expectations of its customers by actively moving closer to customers and further enhancing its ability to perceive issues that previously went unnoticed.
