To deliver safe products to customers, SII develops a wide range of quality assurance processes throughout the Group from customers’ viewpoints.

The SII Group Basic Quality Policy 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 established a quality assurance promotion system to take 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 phase
3. Share information of product quality and safety

The SII Group quality assurance and product safety promotion systems consist of the SII President, the Group’s quality assurance representative serving as a chief executive, and quality assurance representatives in each operating division.

Each operating division conducts quality assurance activities based on the Basic Quality Policy. In cooperation with the Product Technology Development Division and the Instrumental Analysis Division, the Head Office Quality Assurance Department develops company-wide initiatives by information sharing with Division quality assurance departments, as well as active support, education and audit. Especially for quality assurance and product safety information sharing, a network of quality assurance representatives in each operating division was established to develop speedy activities.

For the most part, quality problems and variances occur due to causes in the development and design stages. As a part of quality improvement activity, SII ensures product quality in these stages to raise the products’ entire quality level.

To achieve this goal, SII has taken a variety of initiatives to enhance engineers’ views and ways of thinking, using quality engineering, statistical approach, 3D CAD, CAE and instrumental analysis. We also strive to minimize quality variances due to concurrent optimization of design and machining parameters in collaboration with Quality Assurance Division, Research and Development Division, Production Technology Division and Analytical Estimate Division.

The SII basic product safety concept is "to improve customers’ trust by providing safe products and services". Based on this concept, we established the Product Safety Network. For all the SII products, it conducts regular inspections of compliance with laws and regulations concerning product and technical safety, as well as verifying product safety and appropriateness according to each country’s engineering laws and regulations.

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster triggered by the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in March 2011 created serious radioactive contamination issues, resulting in several countries introducing import restrictions, implementation of inspections for radiation, and overseas customers’ requests for manufacturers to issue certificates certifying that products have not been affected by radioactive contamination. To promptly handle this emergency situation, we assembled quality assurance managers from all divisions and instructed them to measure radiation on all our products immediately after the accident occurred.

In case of accidents due to SII products, we report to senior management within ten minutes, as well as promoting information sharing throughout the entire Group and conducting horizontal activities to promptly solve and prevent problems.

In addition to the basic safety education to raise product safety awareness and cultivate engineers with safety knowledge, we hold the Electric Safety Standard Working Group and provide programs to acquire more specialized knowledge.

The Head Office Quality Assurance Division conducts an annual "Operating Process Review" of all the operating divisions in Japan and overseas. The review includes checking the certainty, the level of employee awareness and the progress of improvement of all operation processes from development through manufacturing. There are two kinds of review： the review focusing on manufacturing and the review focusing on development and design, and they are implemented alternately every year.

In FY2010, specifically the IT system and its management situation are also reviewed, and cases that can serve as a useful reference will be horizontally deployed across the board. As a result of the continuous review, we feel that the awareness level and our manufacturing strength have increased.