FEATURE ARTICLE
ADVANCING A TRUE QUALITY CULTURE Quality Matters: Building a Foundation for Sustainable Quality
A t S&C, quality is more than a metric — it’s a reflection of our commitment to our customers, ensuring reliability, safety, and satisfaction across every product we deliver. To support long-term quality improvements, we introduced a value stream structure across our operations: Lateral Automation, Switchgear, Fuse Products, Transmission Switches, Feeder Automation, and Canada. Each value stream integrates critical functions — manufacturing engineering, quality engineering, materials management, and more — under a single leader. This alignment accelerates decision-making, improves transparency, and strengthens collaboration. Driving a true quality culture is a concerted effort, and the results are showing.
QUALITY IN ACTION METAL-ENCLOSED SWITCHGEAR (MES): REDUCING ASSEMBLY DEFECTS MES is critical for safely distributing electrical power. Any defect can compromise performance and reliability. Within our MES product line, assembly defects lead to a high defects per unit (DPU) — specifically, a DPU of 3.332 in 2024 — as well as the associated cost of poor quality (COPQ). “To address this, the team implemented weekly monitoring of defect types, conducted deep root- cause analyses, and introduced in-process inspections to catch issues earlier in the build,” said Aaditya Janakiram, senior director, quality. “It was truly a cross-functional and highly collaborative effort.” Together, the team’s efforts led to improved work instructions, targeted training, enhanced tooling and visual management systems like Andon boards. The result: a 32% year-over-year improvement in DPU and a significant reduction in COPQ — clear evidence of sustainable quality gains.
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Volts & Jolts | Volume 68 | Issue 3
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