Volvo Trucks receives award for quality-enhancement work
By actively involving more areas of the company, Volvo Trucks has further strengthened its position on quality. The work carried out in the ‘Quality Bridge Plan’ project is being hailed as a shining example for the entire Volvo Group, winning it the Volvo Group Internal Quality Award.
Volvo Trucks’ ‘Quality Bridge Plan’ involves a cross-functional drive, calling upon the organisation to take its commitment to quality even further. Instead of focusing mainly on the quality of the manufactured vehicles, Volvo Trucks wanted to work in a much more structured and focused way with its entire value chain, so, for instance, aftermarket products and services are given equal important.
“In order to maintain and strengthen our leading position, we decided to reinforce our quality-enhancement work on a broader front throughout the company. For our customers, perceived quality is about much more than just the product itself,” says Karin Strömberg, Chief Project Manager for the Quality Bridge Plan.
“Everything makes a difference, from how each part of the truck is designed and assembled to how well the customer is received at service visits and how the visit as a whole is handled. We wanted to ensure that the entire organisation adopted this approach in a more concrete and measurable way,” Karin explained.
The customer in focus
The ‘Quality Bridge Plan’ was developed with this holistic view of quality as its very foundation and more than 20 sub-projects were initiated that put the focus firmly on quality and customer satisfaction. Each sub-project had clear-cut targets and these were continuously followed up by the cross-functional steering committee. The goal was set for three years down the line and, by the end of 2009, Volvo Trucks was able to confirm both through its own and others’ assessments that most of the targets successfully had been reached.
“’Quality’ is one of our core values. Now we have found a way of working that both reinforces and secures our leading position. However, this does not mean that we can afford to relax; instead, the ‘Quality Bridge Plan’ now moves from being a project to becoming part of our daily work,” says project owner Sven Wallström, Director Service & Product Quality.
The ‘Quality Bridge Plan’ project has attracted attention throughout the Volvo Group and it recently received the Volvo Group Internal Quality Award for 2010. The aim of this award is to spotlight quality issues in the Group and to pick out good examples to inspire even better quality-enhancement work within the Volvo Group.
