Product quality and safety

Ever since our inception, Hitachi, Construction Machinery has maintained a customer-first quality assurance system based on the "quality gleaning"* concept of Hitachi, Ltd.

In September 1995, we obtained ISO 9001 certification, verifying and making clear our commitment to quality assurance policies. We also established the Corporate Quality Assurance Division as our umbrella organization for ensuring the quality of all Hitachi Construction Machinery Group products. This division formulates the policies and sets the targets for product quality, develops strategies and specific measures for implementing them, and oversees their actual execution. In addition, the Quality Assurance Center at the Tsuchiura Works, the Group�fs �gmother�h plant, leads the actual guidance, awareness-building, and training activities for the quality assurance divisions of each Group company. In these ways, we have worked to strengthen our quality assurance system.

To enhance further our global quality assurance system, the Quality Assurance Center at the Tsuchiura Works was placed directly under the Corporate Quality Assurance Division in April 2012. By having the Corporate Quality Assurance Division oversee the quality assurance programs at all of the Group�fs production bases in Japan and overseas, we are working to standardize and raise the quality level of the Group�fs entire lineup of products, with the aim of realizing a uniform "Made by Hitachi" global quality.

The Corporate Quality Assurance Division collects comments and requests from customers and sales & service personnel as well as information about problems with products through each quality assurance department. This information is reported at monthly product improvement meetings, which are attended by the president, and after investigation of the underlying cause of a particular problem, countermeasures are taken to prevent any recurrences of the problem in not only the product in question but all other similar products as well.

* Like the painstaking efforts made by the workers in Millet's painting The Gleaners, "quality gleaning" means to re-inspect and verify the causes of problems or accidents, fix the inherent causes, and carry out thorough measures to prevent any recurrence of the problem.

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