Product Liabilities

Basic Concept

The products manufactured by the Yamato Kogyo Group support social infrastructure that is indispensable to people's daily lives, such as buildings, port construction, ships, and railroad turnouts. If a problem or quality issue were to occur with a product, the impact would be significant due to the nature of social infrastructure, leading to not only loss of opportunity but also damage to trust and reputational risk.
We are aware of our responsibility to support these social infrastructures, and by listening to our customers and society, proposing new values, and making continuous improvements, we aim to place the highest priority on providing safe, secure, high-quality, and high-value-added products and services.

Medium-term Sustainability Plan "Product Liabilities"

* Unless otherwise stated, descriptions under these items target iron and steel products business, that would have the greatest impact on the Yamato Kogyo Group.

Ensuring Product Quality and Safety

The steel products manufactured by our group are mainly general-purpose products that are defined by JIS, the Japanese national standard. The products are shipped based on the test results of each lot, and each product is assigned a serial number and production date, which can be traced back to the serial number. As a result of our pursuit of product quality, there have been no recalls due to quality problems.
In addition, we are making continuous efforts to improve our quality and reliability as follows.

• Automation of tension testing machines to improve data reliability.
• Applied for expansion of JIS certification for products with new dimensions, and obtained new JIS certification for special dimension sizes that are not on the standard dimension list of JIS H-beams.
• We are now considering the use of 3D scanning for inspection of cast steel products and machined parts and operational improvement.
• Thoroughly prevent human error and data falsification by automating the process from test results to result reporting.
• Based on a quality management system based on ISO 9001, we have acquired JIS, classification society standards, and other standard certifications required for steel products.

Quality complaints received from customers is shared with the Quality Assurance Department and the manufacturing site, with the sales department acting as the point of contact, to track down the causes and make further improvements. The number of complaints in FY2023 improved by 26% compared to FY2020. We will focus on improving the quality of large products and maintain the quality management level, although the ratio of sales of large products to properties is expected to increase further as the production of blast furnaces is downsized.

Appropriate product information disclosure / CS improvement

To guarantee the quality of our products, we submit to our customers the inspection certificates related to JIS products and JIS and ISO certificates. We also disclose the chemical composition of our products and histograms of mechanical properties through our sales department if requested by our customers. In addition to promptly responding to monthly production size disclosures and requests for product shipments, we are also able to identify and flexibly respond to changes in customer requests and needs as received from the sales department and customer satisfaction surveys.
In FY2023, customer satisfaction with quality items improved from the previous year, although the ratio of sales of large-scale products with high manufacturing difficulty increased. We will continue to implement activities based on the quality management system based on ISO9001, while strengthening our quality assurance system, guidance, and education, especially in quality improvement of large products, to improve customer satisfaction.