The new Committee is intended to enable assessments from an objective perspective regarding the Group’s overall quality activities, including quality compliance activities. It is also purposed to ensure the effectiveness of mechanisms to prevent the recurrence of quality-assurance problems, as well as to ensure the vitality of management, corporate culture building, and quality-control and quality-assurance activities.

The Recurrence Prevention Project reports to the Quality Committee on the details of recurrence prevention activities for quality-assurance problems, as well as those of qualitycontrol and quality-assurance activities. The Quality Committee confirms the details of these reports, and provides guidance and advice regarding the Group’s activities.

4M normalization activities are daily activities to recognize, minimize, and control variations in the 4Ms: Man (manpower), Machine (equipment), Materials, and Methods, and we position them as particularly important quality-control activities in the Group. During 4M normalization activities, we place importance on collecting small “insights” about a process and making improvements to these small insights. By continuing to make these incremental improvements, we aim to build a connected process that is free from 4M irregularities, and will improve the safety, quality, and comfort of worksites by eliminating, reducing, and controlling unnecessary items, unnecessary conditions, and unnecessary requirements at monozukuri sites.

The Proterial Group designates April as Quality Compliance Month and April 27 as Quality Compliance Day every year, and in conjunction with Quality Month in November, which is a nationwide initiative, we take these opportunities to reaffirm our commitment to quality activities by all employees. In 2022, we conducted quality-compliance training and questionnaire surveys in April and November (and partially in December) for our domestic worksites. We received comments to the effect that employees were able to reconfirm the importance of quality compliance, and that employees attained a deeper understanding from the explanations of technical terms. We will continue to make improvements to ensure more effective educational content, and will continue to implement education in a way that raises the awareness of quality compliance throughout the Group.

To enhance our employeesʼ understanding of quality compliance and ensure the effectiveness of reform, the CEO, CQO, and other layers of management send out messages on quality compliance and hold town-hall style meetings on quality on an ongoing basis. At the same time, since 2021, we have been adding integrity, sincerity, and honesty as evaluation items in personnel evaluations of managers.

Securing the inspection system means establishing a system that automatically imports measured values from measurement equipment to a PC, automatically determines whether a product passes or fails on the basis of that measurement data, and automatically prepares a report to be submitted to the customer. That automated system is in stark contrast to the conventional one that involves human intervention such as writing the measured values on a special form by hand or entering them into a PC during the inspection process. Moreover, it eliminates the need to write down the measured values and the occurrence of operational errors such as incorrectly writing or mis-typing the measured values. It also improves inspection efficiency by eliminating the need to write down the measured values on special paper or input them into a computer. We have been systematically working to upgrade and modify measurement equipment at each site, and plan to complete the introduction of these measurement equipment during FY2024 with the intention of finishing data input by the first half of FY2025.

The Proterial Group organizes the International QA Meeting for the purpose of stimulating communication, sharing information and best practices related to quality assurance and quality control, and discussing the establishment of a globally unified QMS system. These meetings are attended by the quality-assurance managers from Group companies around the world and by employees involved in quality assurance in Japan. This meeting was held for the first time as a Group in November 2021. During the third International QA Meeting held in December 2022, participants shared initiatives involving changes in work procedures and inspection automation that led to major outcomes for product quality and production. We will continue to hold the International QA Meeting as a forum for global dialogue on quality with the aim of invigorating the quality activities of the entire Proterial Group.

In June 2022, we established the Quality Help Desk, which allows employees to discuss their concerns regarding quality within the company with peace of mind. The Corporate Quality Assurance Division, Quality Assurance Unit, serves as the contact point for employees that still find it difficult to make a decision even after repeated dialogue and consultation at their workplace. Moreover, the Help Desk will enhance the understanding of quality activities within the Proterial Group by offering advice and by working to solve problems.