With the aim of quickly detecting and responding to a serious claim and preventing the recurrence of a similar claim, OMRON manages quality information at the corporate level by gathering inquiries and other customer feedback on defects on a daily basis.

Well-established procedures are in place to quickly relay accurate and complete information to top executives in the event of a serious claim. A serious claim reporting system has also been established to minimize damage to customers and quickly implement necessary actions to improve quality. OMRON defines the following claims as serious claims, with these definitions further segmented at each business division.

• Claims related to bodily injury, death or fire
• Claims with high social impact and related media attention
• Claims with sizable impact on client companies
• Claims in which the company's loss exceeds a specified amount
• Claims involving product recall

OMRON also organizes rank-specific training courses so as to help employees acquire the necessary knowledge regarding quality control and assurance.

The Quality & Environment Center of the Monozukuri Innovation Headquarters conducts quality audits for various business divisions and Group companies. The quality audits use evidentiary documents and checklists to verify that a quality assurance system has been fully established and is being operated in conformance with OMRON's quality policy.

In fiscal 2008, OMRON plans to launch a new quality risk audit while continuing regular quality audits, in order to further enhance its quality assurance system. The new audit will determine whether quality assurance processes related to safety, security and reliability are properly functioning from the perspective of customers, based on actual cases in which products have become subject to customer complaints.

Based on the results of these audits, OMRON aims to fully understand customer requirements and prevent a recurrence of problems that have occurred in the past. OMRON will also use the audits to evaluate safety from the user's point of view, while conducting a total review of the existing quality assurance system and taking corrective/improvement measures when necessary.

At OMRON, each business company is committed to training personnel in charge of quality management and assurance. At the corporate level, rank-specific quality training programs are available for employees, along with FMEA^* training mainly targeting development, design and quality assurance personnel.

As in previous years, various quality training programs were organized in fiscal 2007, with management-class seminars attracting 179 participants and training courses for leaders drawing 49 participants. A total of 78 employees took the FMEA training course.

For fiscal 2008, a plan is under consideration to reorganize the overall quality education system, including each business company's training programs, aiming for continued personnel development. As part of this plan, OMRON will further enhance quality education for new and recently promoted employees.

* FMEA (Failure Modes and Effects Analysis) is a methodology for analyzing potential failure modes within a system. Failures are classified by the materiality according to the seriousness of their consequences, frequency of occurrence and ease of detection so that effective measures can be drafted in the design stage to avoid future failures.