Quality Assurance, Stable Supply

As global efforts to achieve carbon neutrality accelerate, customer needs for lower torque to reduce energy loss, extended product life, and lighter-weight products are increasing more and more. To ensure customer satisfaction, it is essential to respond flexibly to their requirements, and build trusting relationships. We strive to maintain and improve product quality globally in accordance with our Quality Policy, which serves as the basic philosophy for all of our “monozukuri” (manufacturing) activities, in order to create quality that satisfies our customers.

Quality Policy

Pursuing right quality to meet functions and specifications requested by our customers.

• Applicable quality — Our quality should immediately respond to the change of our customers’ requirements.
• Competitive quality — We have to win quality competition.
• Quality for economy — Quality should benefit our company.

Quality Management Policy

The Quality Management Policy, comprising quality targets and measures for achieving these targets, is established every fiscal year under the direction of top management and communicated to the entire company. Based on the results of quality performance, such as claims and failure costs from the previous fiscal year, we plan measures for the current fiscal year and reflect them in this policy. In addition, each business site establishes an action plan based on this Quality Management Policy and monitors the progress of activities toward the established quality targets on a monthly basis.
The Quality Management Policy for FY2026 describes the following main measures: “Identifying risks related to change points and taking appropriate measures,” “Conducting on-site audits of special processes and promoting focused control in high-risk areas,” and “Developing quality human resources capable of implementing lessons learned and countermeasures from past issues.”
By promoting each measure under the quality slogan “Quality is our future,” we aim to build quality that is trusted by our customers.

■Quality slogan

Quality management system

Organization

With the aim of strengthening our quality assurance system, we have established an organizational structure that centrally manages the Quality divisions.
The Quality Headquarters now directly supervises and oversees the Quality Assurance Departments of each Works, promoting the monitoring and management of quality issues and their control systems, strengthening the promotion of standardization, and developing quality specialists.

■Organization chart

ISO9001/IATF16949 certification status

In order to improve customer satisfaction and provide consistent products and services, the Group’s domestic and overseas manufacturing sites have acquired ISO9001 certification, which is an international quality management system standard. New businesses and newly established production plants are working on acquiring certifications in sequence, and we have achieved a 100% certification acquisition rate for our quality management system, including for domestic and overseas consolidated subsidiaries engaged in manufacturing.

We have also acquired IATF16949 certification, a standard for the automotive industry, and JIS Q 9100 and Nadcap, standards for the aerospace industry, as well as CRCC (China) certification for the railway industry.

Efforts to improve quality

Ensuring stable quality

When implementing new developments and process changes, risk assessment is performed using a risk analysis sheet to strengthen control. Risk assessment involves a cross-functional approach, with each department participating in the verification and evaluation from its respective perspective to identify and prevent quality risks at an early stage. This ensures that reliable quality is built into the manufacturing process and helps to secure stable quality.
At manufacturing sites, in particular, to ensure rigorous change point (change/modification) management, potential change points are identified in advance, and the response procedures and sharing methods are listed in advance at each workplace, thereby preventing defects from occurring. The “Change Point Management Procedure” is regularly reviewed to ensure that change points and their response procedures are reliably operated in accordance with the procedure.
We also review the risk of potential quality issues and assess the effectiveness of preventive measures by promoting quality audits at manufacturing sites (including for suppliers), globally deploying check sheets that summarize the key points of quality control, and collecting the respective inspection results.
For managing quality information, we use our quality information management system (G-QUICK), which centrally manages customer complaints and claims on a globally, to distribute information immediately to the relevant departments for early problem solving.

Developing human resources with strong quality skills

Specialized quality education

To enhance employees’ knowledge and awareness of quality, we conduct specialized quality education such as “basic QC (quality control) courses” and “advanced QC courses.” In these training sessions, in addition to learning about quality management concepts, statistical methods, and problem-solving techniques, we introduce specific examples of claims that have caused inconvenience to customers, and explain their causes and countermeasures as part of past-issue training in order to help employees reaffirm the importance of quality and to prevent recurrence and ensure that past countermeasures are not forgotten. Additionally, specialized quality training is provided for supervisors involved in manufacturing, serving as an opportunity to reinforce their response capabilities to quality issues and deepen their understanding of their roles and responsibilities regarding quality.

Quality and Technical Knowledge Transfer Initiatives

To make effective use of the knowledge and know-how related to special processes accumulated over many years, we have constructed a “Special Process Knowledge Database.” The experiential knowledge of skilled engineers that had been scattered throughout the organization, along with examples of defects and key control points, have been systematically organized, accumulated, and visualized in a form accessible to everyone. Building on this knowledge base, we are advancing human resource development related to special processes and the application of AI to estimate the causes of defects, with the aim of achieving sustainable quality improvement and strengthening technical knowledge transfer.

“Quality Day” Activities

We promote “Quality Day” activities with the aim of improving quality awareness and preventing recurrence by revisiting past major claims and reconfirming their causes and countermeasures.
Past-issue training is conducted on the designated implementation date at each plant, conveying to workers who were not present at the time the background and significance of the management and operational methods adopted, thereby preventing countermeasures from being forgotten and aiming to raise quality awareness.

Quality Month

To further promote quality awareness among all employees, we carry out various activities every November during “Quality Month.” The FY2025 NTN theme was “Tackling Change to Shape the Future – Building New Value Together.” Under this theme, each employee had the opportunity to consider how to challenge themselves to enhance their own capabilities, embrace various changes in a positive manner, and identify what improvements should be made in order to create new value through collaboration with colleagues.

As part of these activities, a customer satisfaction survey is conducted, providing an opportunity to hear directly from customers about their satisfaction levels and any requests they may have. In the FY2025 survey, we received responses from 103 companies. The percentage of responses rating the overall evaluation as “Excellent” or “Good” was 96%. We will make improvements based on customer feedback and continue to provide quality that meets customer needs, aiming to further enhance customer satisfaction.

We optimize the overall supply chain from material procurement to production and logistics in an integrated manner, building a system that can maintain stable supply even amid fluctuations in demand and changes in the market environment. Furthermore, by advancing optimal production at the best global locations, we are comprehensively optimizing costs, lead times, and risks, thereby strengthening our supply structure. To achieve even more stable supply of our products, we are also working on expanding our immediate delivery system of standard products’ inventory for the aftermarket (FIRST), as well as external procurement.