Total Quality Control
When the highest reverence for seating as a safety-critical component meets a companywide drive to compete—even against ourselves—it gives rise to a quality-control value system unlike any other. That’s how NHK Seating ensures the very best products go into every OEM customer’s vehicle.
In-Process QC and Traceability
NHK Seating maintains key safety and other quality checks along the assembly line, throughout the process. This enables production to take the most cost-efficient path to quality assurance by addressing defects immediately, before they manifest themselves in high volume, while expediting throughput to stay on schedule.
Key performance-confirmation checkpoints may include:
- Seat function
- Power-seat noise
- Appearance
- Coupler attachment
- Seatbelt
- Heater current
- ODS (occupant detection) sensor
—And any other OEM quality specs
Further, for long-term quality improvement, NHK also maintains a product-traceability barcode system that identifies and differentiates individual seat components, including frames, airbags and ODS sensors.
Continuous Improvement
Because communication is the only way to ensure the best ideas drive the manufacturing and QC process, NHK Seating holds fast to a consistent, clockwork schedule of team meetings.
- Cross-functional Obeya (or “operations”) meetings facilitate an optimum level of productivity, quality and efficiency by preventing “departmental think”—a manufacturing trait notorious for promoting assumptions that cause mistakes and redundancies that cost money.
- Weekly quality meetings bring representatives from each department together—on the production floor—to exchange information, share insights and solve problems.