Quality Assurance

Basic ideas and policies

Resonac's mission is to provide safe and reliable products and services to its customers throughout the entire product cycle from development and design to marketing, manufacturing, sales, and post-marketing follow-up via our quality assurance activities in keeping with our quality policy of "providing global top-level quality to contribute to the sustainable development of society”. In addition, we aim to maximize the value we provide through co-creation based on a relationship of trust with our various stakeholders, including customers and business partners, thereby contributing to the transformation and development of society.

Promotion system

Quality assurance activities at Resonac are carried out on a day-to-day basis by the quality assurance departments located at each manufacturing plant. We have also established a head office organization under the Chief Quality Officer (CQO) known as the Quality Assurance Headquarters, which is charged with formulating strategies and systems, managing systems, and auditing and monitoring quality within the Resonac Group. The PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) cycle is used to undertake improvements through close cooperation among these organizations. To further strengthen the PDCA cycle, a group responsible for stepping up global governance and promoting IT systemization has been established as a head office organization to reinforce quality assurance functions throughout the Resonac Group and pursue more efficient and sophisticated operations.
Activities related to quality assurance will be reported to management through the Sustainability Promotion Council, while the Quality Assurance Managers' Council will promote the sharing of policies, priority issues, and best practices between the head office and plants.

Strategies

We have set the following priority measures for the time being and will pursue them on a global basis.

Priority measures

1. 1. Reinforcement of quality assurance governance

   We will entrench and continuously review rules, establish an RHQ* structure, and simplify and standardize operations.

2. 2. Human resources development and fostering of a safety culture

   We will improve quality-related education programs, and roll them out throughout the Group. Through an e-learning program, we will endeavor to prevent the inappropriate inspections that were uncovered at former Hitachi Chemical in 2018 from being forgotten, and will strive to develop human resources with high levels of skills and ethics and to foster a safety culture.

3. 3. DX to maximize the value we provide

   By building IT systems, we will make our quality assurance operations more sophisticated and efficient and strengthen functions for managing changes and modifications, and by managing trends, we will enhance our administrative capabilities.

Targets

We have set "zero product accidents" and "zero quality noncompliance violations" as indicators and goals, and we aim to have the entire Resonac Group operating under a globally unified quality assurance framework by 2030, building a relationship of trust with customers through quality and maximizing the value provided through our business activities. The following KPIs are being pursued as material issue KPIs.

Quality management system

Resonac has established quality management systems appropriate for each of its products and organizations, and has obtained certification for international standards such as ISO9001 and IATF16949. Following the revision of these international standards, we completed the transition process by the transition deadline of 2018.
We leveraged the opportunity presented by the transition to strengthen our quality management system and further improve the quality of our products and services.

Product safety management

We have established our own "Quality Assurance and Quality Control Regulations" (hereinafter referred to as "the Regulations") as basic rules for post-integration efforts to ensure product safety as well as to comply with laws and regulations. With the idea in mind of maximizing customer experience (CX) while ensuring that our customers can use our products safety and with peace of mind, we conduct risk assessments of all products and we have established a screening system to determine whether to ship or market products based on a risk-based approach for "sample shipments" and "product launches" that provide new products to customers. Going forward, we aim to provide even safer and more secure products, services, and solutions that transcend the manufacturing industry.

Enhancement of on-site capabilities

To raise the level of quality assurance and quality control at Resonac, we have set forth the goal of "bolstering on-site capabilities (the competence and awareness of people working on-site)" and we are working to establish a job level-based education system (providing high-quality education curricula matched to specific job levels) to develop quality assurance human resources able to compete globally. We are also striving for greater efficiency and standardization in our operations and for automation of inspection systems to prevent quality irregularities and human errors.

Quality risk diagnoses and audits

The Head Office’s Quality Assurance Department visits individual organizations and conducts quality risk assessments every year to strengthen governance across the entire group and to clarify and share the strengths and weaknesses of specific business units, plants and Group companies. These diagnoses identify quality risks in business activities and lead to their reduction. We also conduct product compliance audits focusing on compliance as a response to the instance of inappropriate inspection discovered in 2018 at the former Hitachi Chemical.

Quality-related complaints

We have unified our complaint standards in conjunction with integrating Showa Denko and Showa Denko Materials. By implementing measures to prevent recurrence based on the essential causes of complaints and utilizing lessons learned from complaints that have occurred to date, we aim to reduce the number of complaints by 20% each year – using the number of complaints in 2022 as a benchmark – with the goal of halving the number of complaints by 2025.

• ESG Performance Data