Product Liability/Quality Assurance

We are working to enhance the quality of our existing products through such efforts as ensuring rapid response to complaints, taking measures to prevent recurrences of problems, and rigorous 4M change control. Cross-functional responses are made to rapidly solve not only serious but also minor complaints. In order to prevent new occurrences and recurrence of issues leading to complaints and process abnormality, we use methods like “Why-Why Analysis” and “Further Investigation” to identify what happened, causes, and countermeasures, among other factors, concerning these issues. From fiscal 2022, we have been promoting integrated management of complaints for new businesses too and collaborating on reduction activities, and will continue to do so in fiscal 2023.

There is a need to improve (optimize) the output quality (degree of perfection) of product designs and process designs when developing new products and to shorten (minimize) the time required for the development process by minimizing rework. In order for our Group to meet these needs, we continually make efforts toward improvement and refinement our QMS from the standpoint of functional assurance.

In new product development, initial plans are often delayed because of the tendency for a variety of problems requiring reworking to arise. To prevent this, we implement the Plan-Do-Check-Action (PDCA) cycle to increase the degree of perfection of design quality and shorten the development period through collaboration of all the divisions concerned from the initial phases. Furthermore, we implement the following to ensure that the problems do not recur in subsequent development work.

In addition to design review (DR) during each stage of product design and process design, we conduct Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) to predict potential failures or abnormalities by analyzing health and safety risks regarding people including customers related to our products, along with Design Review Based on Failure Mode (DRBFM) that focuses on changes to the design and changes to conditions and the environment. In turn, we implement risk reduction measures in all processes of DR, FMEA, and DRBFM as well as during technical verification at the time of using new raw materials. In addition, we use Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) that rationally analyzes accidents and defects in a hierarchical manner to discover root causes and fundamental solutions for preventing recurrence.

In foscal 2022, our approach to functional assurance (functional block diagram with elementary blocks) has been added to quality training for young employees as activities to reduce missed extracts (exceptions) during failure mode. We will continue these educational efforts in fiscal 2023.

We manage complaints relating to quality using the “QPIT” system. QPIT (Quality & Production Information Tools) is a system that allows the central management of quality- and production-related information, and it has been built into the Groupwide intranet. The system was introduced and utilized in order to accelerate the communication of quality- and production-related information within the Group, facilitate the sharing of information quickly with management, and encourage the integration and effective utilization of information levels. We can provide feedback of complaint statistics based on QPIT information to business units in order to confirm the effectiveness of claim recurrence prevention and to shorten the time required to respond to claims, ensuring quick and accurate handling of complaints in an efficient manner.

We are utilizing various kinds of information stored in the QPIT, like details of complaints and customer requests, to enhance CS. Similar complaints and customer requests, and cases from other department businesses can be used as reference, and by analyzing the content and trends of such information and implementing measures to address the issues while building a framework to improve these and sharing these internally, a wide range of divisions can work to achieve the aim of improving CS.

We rolled out and began using the new QPIT22 system in fiscal 2022, which is used for statistical analysis of the complaints database that is compiled for data record purposes. We have also begun creating a centralized data dashboard to share quality information across the group.

For the quality audit for fiscal 2022, we continued to carry out the ‘Monozukuri’ Audits (see below), a multifaceted auditing system launched in 2017 by the Corporate Production Management and Engineering Division with the view to building a safe and reliable (personnel, facilities, environmental, and quality) approach to monozukuri.

The Corporate Quality Assurance Promotion Department inspects and examines operations daily from customers’ perspectives through support of R&D activities at research departments (participation in DR, cooperation with FMEA, etc.) and support of production activities at each business department (change control, FEMA, FTA, Why-Why Analysis, and Further Investigation, participation in quality meetings and DR, maintaining/managing quality information and quality data, and checking the appropriateness of complaint countermeasures, etc.). It also carries out activities to raise awareness about quality improvement.

Conventional audits that have been conducted for quality, environment, and safety for each business site made it difficult for us to identify the root issues each business site is faced with, due to factors such as insufficient man-hours spent on the audits, inadequate skills of the auditors, and a lack of information provided beforehand. Furthermore, the internal audits conducted by each business site focused on the management system, and it was not possible to successfully link the activities from the extraction of essential issues to the prevention of recurrence and prevention. We built an audit system (combining ‘Monozukuri’ Audits and internal audits) that is able to identify the root issues at each business site, correct and improve the situation, and prevent occurrence and recurrence of issues.

In fiscal 2022, we established and implemented an educational plan in order to strengthen education for Internal Auditors by dividing into finely differentiated steps the process starting before internal auditing and proceeding beyond ‘Monozukuri’ Audits.