Articles

Ford Motor Company has just awarded the highest status level to Yaskawa Electric Corporation under the guidelines of Ford’s new Reliability and Maintainability (R&M) program. Yaskawa Electric is the first Tier II control supplier to achieve GREEN status.

GREEN status indicates that Yaskawa has proven to Ford’s satisfaction that Yaskawa uses fully institutionalized R&M discipline systems throughout its design, manufacturing and repair cycles. During Ford’s audit, Yaskawa Electric demonstrated routine use of such tools as “Root Cause Analysis,” vendor problem identification / resolution capabilities and well-managed product improvement methodologies for existing and new designs. These systems insure a uniform product of increasingly high quality.

A RECENT addition to Yaskawa’s system is that it now transposes portions of data from its extensive, continuous QA/QC reporting system into FRED, a standardized statistical reporting tool chosen by Ford. Plant visits were made and will continue as Yaskawa and Ford personnel review performance of products, some of which were installed 14 years ago. Local record keeping shows that hundreds of Yaskawa products have been in service with virtually no failures.

Yaskawa has also proven that during programs, it has and can support equipment builders and plant operations so that products are properly selected and installed. The goal of the R&M program is to focus on cost of ownership of equipment in operation and requires vendors to prove their advantage to Ford during the entire ownership cycle. Only those vendors having demonstrated firmly institutionalized practices and superior performance in five key areas can be awarded GREEN status.

The backbone of Yaskawa Electric is high quality. Yaskawa is a recipient of ISO 9000 and ISO 14000 certifications and holds numerous quality excellence awards, including the prestigious Deming Application Prize. This prize was awarded to Yaskawa in 1984, and it remains the only company in the world, in its field, to maintain this distinction.

Yaskawa Electric America, Inc., 2121 Norman Drive South, Waukegan, IL 60085. Tel: 800-YASKAWA; Fax: 847-887-7310.