Quality Assurance and Product Safety

Our Concepts and SII Group Basic Quality Policy

SII deploys a wide range of quality assurance activities across the board from customers' viewpoints to ensure that our customers use our products safely with a sense of security.

"Improve the Quality, Cost, Delivery and Safety of our Products and Services to create increased value for customers."

This is the SII Group Basic Quality Policy, which incorporates our strong commitment to achieve customer satisfaction with our product quality as well as meeting high standard of cost, delivery and product safety.

We have established a quality assurance promotion system to embody the policy and have been taking the following basic measures.

1. Comply with each country's engineering laws, regulations and a wide variety of specifications
2. Establish a system and develop human resources to ensure product quality and safety in the development and design phases
3. Share information of product quality and safety

Quality Assurance Promotion System

We have established the SII Group quality assurance and product safety promotion systems that consist of the SII President, the Group's quality assurance representative serving as a chief executive, and quality assurance representatives in each division.

Each division conducts quality assurance activities based on the Basic Quality Policy. The Quality Assurance Division at the head office deploys company-wide initiatives through information sharing with quality assurance departments at each division, active support, education, and audit. Especially for information sharing about quality assurance and product safety, a network was established among quality assurance representatives at each division to take speedy actions.

ISO9001 and IATF16949 Certification

SII has acquired ISO 9001 (2015) certification, an international standard for quality management systems. With the aim of further strengthening our company-wide quality assurance system, we are working to move away from conventional certification of individual business units and affiliates to a company-wide, integrated certification. We have completed the unification of our domestic sites in Japan. We have also organized a Quality Management System Study Group to improve the effectiveness of the system.
Our divisions involved in the automotive industry have also acquired IATF16949 certification.

Quality-Related Education

We provide quality control training for all employees so that each and every one of them can contribute to quality improvement. Currently, we offer a total of 30 courses in six areas, ranging from courses for beginners to expert development.
In addition to these group training programs, we also provide product-specific training for each division, aiming to enhance the effectiveness of training by meeting the quality requirements of each product.
In FY 2022 we provided a variety of training to a total of more than 500 employees at our sites in Japan and around the world. To provide opportunities for learning in different environments, we use face-to-face, remote, and distance learning methods.

SII encourages its employees to take the Quality Management and Quality Control Examination^*. The aim is to enhance individual knowledge of quality control, which will improve the quality of products. In FY 2023, a total of 41 employees passed the exam from Levels 1 to 4.

^* Quality Management and Quality Control Examination: A certification test on quality control organized by the Japanese Standards Association and the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers, and accredited by the Japanese Society for Quality Control. It is an objective evaluation of the level of knowledge of quality control by a nationwide written test. There are four levels of certification.

Quality Assurance that Establishes Security and Reliability

The SII basic concept of product safety is "to improve customers’ trust by providing safe products and services." Based on this concept, we continue to provide the Products Safety Education to raise product safety awareness and cultivate engineers with safety knowledge.

We also established the Product Safety Network within the SII Group. For all the SII products, it conducts regular inspections of compliance with laws and regulations concerning product and technical safety, and verifies product safety and appropriateness according to each country’s laws and regulations.

In case of accidents due to SII products, we report to the senior management within ten minutes, as well as attempt to promptly solve the problem and prevent the recurrence of accidents. After these actions, we share the information throughout the entire Group and deploy activities horizontally.

Ensuring Product Quality in the Development Phase

For the most part, quality problems and variances occur due to causes in the development and engineering stages. SII ensures product quality in these stages to raise the products' entire quality level, and this approach is part of quality improvement activity in which we put a great deal of effort.

For example, SII has taken a variety of initiatives to enhance engineers' views and ways of thinking, using quality engineering, statistical approach, CAE, and instrumental analysis. We also strive to minimize quality variances derived from concurrent optimization of engineering and machining parameters in collaboration with related divisions including Quality Assurance, Research and Development, Production Engineering and Analytical Estimate Divisions.

Operation Process Review

SII is committed to delivering high-quality products and services to our customers. To ensure this, the Quality Assurance Division at the head office conducts the Operation Process Review for all business divisions, including those overseas. During the reviews, we check the certainty, level of awareness, progress of improvement, effectiveness, and other aspects of all business processes to ensure quality.

Quality Audit / Technical Guidance

To provide high-quality products and services, we must have the ability to conduct audits that identify process issues and the technical expertise to resolve them.
To improve the quality of our audits, we operate an in-house quality management system study group focused on enhancing our auditing capabilities and technical leadership.

Communication with Customers

SII Customer Service Center

SII Customer Service Center is committed to providing prompt, accurate and sincere responses to customer inquiries.
Our customers' opinions, requests, and complaints are communicated to the relevant divisions, and are used effectively for product and service quality improvement.

Our customers’ opinions, requests, and complaints are communicated to the relevant divisions, and are used effectively for product quality improvement.

In addition, we focus on improving the quality of our after-sales service to attain a higher level of customer satisfaction by making recommendations to business units on how to improve the response of the product-handling consultation counter and the repair support and supply counter.

Disclosure of Product Safety and Quality Information

We strive to minimize our customers’ disadvantages by promptly and precisely providing SII products’ safety, accidents, and important quality information.