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Quality is Graco's Cornerstone to Success
 05/31/2005 - Quality is Graco’s Cornerstone to Success
Industry leadership, growth and profitability result from satisfied customers who experience quality products, services and strong relationships with the companies they do business with. Graco’s experience shows that improving quality makes us more competitive, more profitable, and a better place to work. The more effort we put into identifying and solving problems up front, the more satisfied our customers become. That means we spend less time dealing with chronic problems that only increase our costs, drain our energy, and make work frustrating.
Graco’s Quality Policy is simple and direct:
“We strive for excellence and continuous improvement in everything we do. We will understand our customers’ requirements for quality, including reliability, maintainability and durability. We will meet them on time, and take corrective action where appropriate. No defects or delays are acceptable. Quality is the individual responsibility of every Graco employee.
All Graco managers are responsible for managing quality in their area. This includes designing and installing effective processes, setting and monitoring standards, establishing appropriate measures, and most importantly, selecting, training and involving capable, informed employees.
All Graco employees are personally responsible for the quality of their work. Each of us will understand our customers’ requirements and make the personal effort to meet those requirements on time.”
Within this Quality Policy are some specific directives:
• We must clearly understand our customers’ requirements. The designers of the Ford Edsel and Mustang were both confident in the success of their automobiles. However, the Edsel team didn’t seek buyer input, they designed the car “by committee.” Within months it was dubbed a failure. On the other hand, the Mustang design team spent 3 years gathering buyer input and tweaking their prototypes. On the first day of its release, over 20,000 models were sold. The lesson learned is that if you provide a product or solution that does not meet a customer’s needs or standards, it will fail.
As part of our quality process, we seek input from end-users, material suppliers and other industry specialists to provide products that meet customers’ ever-changing requirements.
• We must follow or create internal processes to ensure that we build quality products. Processes such as ISO 9001, Q1, and Lean Manufacturing/Office initiatives assure our customers that when they do business with Graco — in the United States, Europe, Asia Pacific or Latin America — they will receive consistent, high quality products and services.
• No defects or delays are acceptable. Graco’s “Continuous Improvement” initiative is designed to improve factory and office efficiencies, reduce defects, improve deliveries and other services. “Zero defects” is the responsibility of every Graco employee.
• We will measure the extent to which we meet our customers’ requirements and take corrective action when needed. Measuring the quality of our output — product quality, service quality and the quality of our customer relations — allows us to keep pace with constantly changing and more demanding customer requirements.
• All employees are personally responsible for the quality of their work. Quality-related technologies and processes are important to improving quality, but these tools are only as effective as the people who design them, use them, or improve them. Graco is fortunate that our employees’ involvement makes our quality standards the benchmark for the industries where we compete.
Maintaining and Improving Quality
Our quality improvement strategy emphasizes three primary ways through which to get the job done: technology, effective processes, and employee involvement.
During the past several years Graco has done a great job leveraging new technology and process controls to significantly improve both quality and production. Within the last year, six new machine centers and three new robotic assembly stations have been installed in its manufacturing facilities. Graco’s investment in this new equipment is over $7 million, but an investment to improve quality is an investment well made. These new machine centers and assembly stations produce parts faster and guarantee closer tolerances, assuring consistent high quality results — part after part after part.
In 2004 we also initiated a number of process improvements in our factories that increased efficiency and improved manufacturing processes. In addition to directly affecting Graco’s bottom line, many of these new processes have had a significant impact on quality too.
But while new technologies and processes are important to our quality initiative, there is no technology or process that can improve itself without people. Quality starts with a Graco employee following the processes established to do his or her job, and taking the initiative to think “new and improved.”
The new machining centers and the robotic assembly cells are the drivers behind the labor savings we’ve experienced in our plant, but they are here today because of employees who had a vision of a better way to get Graco’s work done.
Maintaining and improving quality is not an easy task. But it is a task Graco and its employees are determined to provide our customers — worldwide. •
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