Quality policy

What do we understand by quality?
Quality is the keeping of promises to the customer with regard to particular parameters affecting products and services. By customers we mean both the final consumers of our products as well as our direct customers, usually a retail business. From the perspective of an individual process, the subsequent stage is always a customer. The quality on offer equally affects us, our suppliers and our customers.
We distinguish between the quality of processes, services and products. Good quality is the outcome of one's own quality of work, the work quality of the team and the quality of the process.

Where is quality anchored?
Quality is derived from our vision/mission and from our strategy. It is closely related to our three values - learning, commitment and orientation on action and is hence part of the corporate culture. Quality is a promise: commitment ensures that it does not remain an empty promise. Quality is only defined where it is decisive for the satisfaction of the customer: the effect on the customer is therefore decisive. From the continuous improvement process, we learn to avoid lack of quality and to continually improve our quality. ISO 9000, innovation keys, the respective standards of this line of business, as well as laws, constitute the formal framework that surrounds quality.

Who is responsible for quality?
The management has supreme responsibility for quality within the company. It is responsible for defining aims, for making them known and for adhering to them. It also makes the necessary resources available and defines competencies and responsibilities in detail. Generally speaking, everyone is personally responsible for quality within his process and for the products that are manufactured there. These may be products in the narrow sense of the word, or they may be services or documents. Everybody creates quality and verifies it. The task of quality assurance is the making available of suitable evaluation methods, the central undertaking of certain time-consuming tests and assistance in trouble-shooting where quality is concerned.

What is the key thing about quality?
Quality is something measurable. Quality is achieved by keeping to defined, measurable parameters within a predetermined range of tolerance. Parameters are set so that our products and services come up to customer expectations. Where a measured value is too time-consuming or not a sensible one, we define reference values, likewise as a field in which there is room to move. Normally the definition of quality is made in advance and applies equally to all processes and products, i.e. usage properties from the viewpoint of the consumer are determined even during the development phase.

Why is quality so important?
Quality creates satisfied customers, which expresses itself in new orders and therefore in business success. By way of contrast, lack of quality results in considerable damage internally as well as externally: the costs of error correction, the time and attention needed to eliminate faults, which could have been better invested in value-creating activity.

What can we do about deviations from target values?
Deviations from reference values call into question customer satisfaction and thus the economic success of the enterprise. Consequently, all activities shall be directed at avoiding a future repetition of such deviations when they occur and something shall be learnt for the future from what has some to pass.