Establishment of the Monozukuri* Innovation Headquarters

As stipulated in its Management Commitments, OMRON aims to maximize customer satisfaction based on its 'quality first' policy and by offering pioneering products and services. In conformance with this principle, each business company has implemented its own initiatives to improve and maintain quality.

Recently in Japan, there has been a succession of serious accidents resulting from defective products. This shows the importance of a sincere effort by companies to ensure quality. Customer expectations for companies are growing, and OMRON is no exception.

Moreover, OMRON's overseas production is expected to reach 50% of its total production in 2007. These major changes in business scale and structure require an even stricter, more complete, and global dedication to its policies of 'no input, no production and no output' for defective products/parts.

Against this backdrop, OMRON believes that the key to answering customers'exacting quality requirements is to uplift its production capability, which in fact, is essential for any manufacturer. To reinforce production expertise for the entire Group, OMRON set forth a new corporate-level organization called the Monozukuri Innovation Headquarters in September 2006.

This organization promotes innovation in all business processes by addressing quality enhancement from various angles. Specific measures include quality level check for suppliers in the procurement stage, reinforcement of development capabilities in the product development/design stage, enhancement of onsite improvement capabilities for production sites, and environmentally conscious production intended to meet growing demands from customers and society at large.

* Monozukuri is a Japanese term meaning 'the art of producing things'. It enerally relates to craftsmanship in developing, creating and manufacturing products.

Risk Assessment Flow

Observing suppliers' production lines

OMRON purchases raw materials and parts from hundreds of uppliers to produce nearly 100,000 product models. To avoid the supply of defective products, it is essential to avoid acceptance of defective parts in the purchasing stage. Consequently, in addition to eliminating defective parts through inspection, it is important to verify that suppliers' lines have a system in place to prevent the production of defective parts.

With this in mind, the Monozukuri Innovation Headquarters put a line certification system into operation in September 2006. Under this system, OMRON engineers inspect each supplier's production lines and evaluate their system of preventing production of defective parts, giving each a ranking from A to D. OMRON requests improvement for those suppliers who have not yet reached OMRON's required level. By referring to these ranks for selecting parts in the product development stage, OMRON makes sure to avoid the acceptance of defective parts.

To respond to the globalization of business operations, OMRON plans to put a line certification system for all suppliers both in Japan and abroad, and will strive to set forth common global standards to deliver uniform parts quality. A total of 150 lines have been certified by March 2007, including those overseas. OMRON aims to increase the number of certified lines to 800 by fiscal 2008.

Improving the organizational capabilities of development/design sector

When designing a product, developers and designers must fully understand the characteristics of the plant that produces that particular product. In fact, it is not an overstatement to say that most causes of defective products are present in the development/design process.

Based on the awareness that enhancing the organizational capabilities of upstream development/design processes is vital to raising product quality and preventing defective products, various measures are underway at the Monozukuri Innovation Headquarters.

One of the measures intended to bolster the organizational strengths of development/design departments is a process improvement initiative based on an evaluation method called 'Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMIR)'. CMMI is a standardized model of an ideal development/design process flow, which is used to guide process improvement across an entire organization. By allowing staff to evaluate the development/design processes of their own organization and their own work process based on this model on a regular basis, continual improvements of organizational capabilities are promoted to eliminate production of defective parts.

Building a knowledge database for sharing failure cases and countermeasures throughout the Group

To avoid production of defective products, development/design staff must learn from past failures to make sure they do not make the same mistakes over again. Often when problems occur, they are handled individually by the relevant business company. The result is that the lessons of failure and improvement are not well shared throughout the Group.

To cope with this situation, the Monozukuri Innovation Headquarters has constructed an FMEA database that integrates all knowledge information such as quality data and past cases of failures that are generated by each business company. Moreover, OMRON's own support tool dubbed 'Visual Meister' is used to develop a system for preventing recurrence of the same failures on the factory floor to avoid production of defective products.

New analyzer helps recreate usage conditions

Conditions under which products are deployed vary from user to user, and the stress that the products experience is also different. In approximately 60% of all complaints OMRON has received, the claimed failure either could not be reproduced or was due to improper usage beyond its specifications. However, analyses of past defects revealed that a large portion of the defects was induced by electrical interference, thermal stress or mechanical stress such as vibration and impact.

Based on this knowledge, the Monozukuri Innovation Headquarters introduced an advanced analyzer system, which was not possible to own at each business company. The system is used to artificially recreate stresses that cause defects so as to explore the defect-generating mechanism and identify causes of the defect. Obtained data is used for determining design standards and selecting test methods for evaluation. The data is also employed in product design simulations to create products that can be used reliably in a variety of operating environments.

Boosting factory-floor onsite capabilities

In the development/design stage, product conceptualization involves assurance of quality with reliability supported from various angles. The factory-floor's mission is to produce superior products by realizing this concept while maintaining high productivity. To fulfill this mission, continual maintenance and systematic improvement capabilities are needed for production sites.

The Monozukuri Innovation Headquarters considers such a capability to be 'onsite capability' and has established a technology to realize data-supported improvements using a statistical process control approach.

The concept of this technology is to measure, understand and implement onsite data. First, various phenomena that take place on the factory-floor, such as changes in processing conditions and variations in product characteristics, are visualized as data (measure). The visualized data is then analyzed to discover the underlying causes for the phenomena (understand). On the actual factory-floor, various factors are often combined to deliver a specific consequence, so technology for analyzing data is key. Finally, once the background is fully explored, a solution is drafted (implement). OMRON addresses improvement of onsite capabilities by following these three steps.

This technique has been employed for relay production and equipment assembly lines, with results such as reduced defect rates and lead time.

Each one of us must become a professional Monozukuri Innovation Headquarters
Evaluation & Analysis Center General Manger
Yoshitomo Okumura

Tasked with strengthening OMRON's production capabilities, our most important mission is to promote quality enhancement for the entire Group by developing and deploying quality and environment-related technologies as well as core production technologies. By so doing, we support the creation of products that satisfy the expectations of our customers.
We consider fiscal 2007 to be the year for strengthening our relationship with each business company and turning our efforts into solid results, which paves the way for quality improvement for the entire OMRON Group.
I believe that in order to make this happen, all of us at the OMRON Group must become professionals in our respective fields and contribute to the Group's business growth.