Proof of Hitachi Construction Machinery’s Reliability

Delivering high quality products with a strict approach

Quality assurance is an essential task in maintaining trust in our products.
As a construction machinery manufacturer, how does Hitachi Construction Machinery approach this issue and uphold the quality of its products?
We sat down with two employees from the Corporate Quality Assurance Group about their thinking and the actual efforts they make.

Tanaka: After joining the company, I was assigned to the crawler crane department, which we were still manufacturing at the time, where I was in charge of various testing. As a newbie employee, it was my daily job to determine whether the products adhered to the detailed standards that had been prepared for the tests. My supervisor at the time told me that these standards had been developed 10 to 20 years earlier.
These standards reflected the knowledge gained from overcoming problems that occurred at construction sites. This knowledge and the manufacturing skills of senior employees is the basis of the current quality of Hitachi Construction Machinery. Our company’s quality assurance standards have not changed much over its long history, but they have been rearranged to meet the needs of the times.

Sakamoto: In addition to our history, I believe that organizational structure is another major characteristic of Hitachi Construction Machinery's quality assurance. Our structure regarding quality assurance is somewhat unusual. For a long time, the development and assessment departments have belonged to the corporate quality assurance group, which is independent of the development division. While manufacturers in other industries often conduct development and assessment within design and development departments, this has been the case since before I joined Hitachi Construction Machinery. In this respect, I believe that we have an organizational structure that allows us to assess products from the customer's perspective, not from the design and development side, but from a third-party perspective, without compromise. Therefore, many of our testing standards are determined independently by the corporate quality assurance group, not by the design and development side.

Tanaka: We conduct quality assessments based on a test plan, which can be roughly divided into performance tests and reliability tests. Performance tests are conducted to determine if the product performs as designed, while reliability tests are conducted under load, assuming, for example, thousands of hours of operation. In addition, there is a test drive evaluation process to determine operability. This is a test conducted by professional evaluators to see how easy it is to ride and operate the machine, and if the machine does not pass the test, we do not release it to the market. Perhaps the reason why Hitachi Construction Machinery products have long been highly regarded for their operability is because of this kind of attention to detail. However, customers nowadays demand a wide variety of value, and we are always concerned about this when evaluating our products.

Sakamoto: Our approach to quality assurance is rooted in steadily gathering the voice of customers and learning from mistakes. If we were to continue manufacturing high quality products indefinitely, there would be few problems. However, since we are always challenging new technologies, there is always a certain amount of risk involved, and unfortunately, there are times when trouble does occur. That is why we always remember and value the importance of learning from our mistakes, and we share the measures we have learned within the group to prevent the recurrence of defects. We also hold monthly product improvement meetings attended by the President. This may be another example of Hitachi Construction Machinery's unique approach of putting quality first and creating products that customers appreciate and trust.

Tanaka: Today, our company is working to become a true solution provider, and while novel solutions such as ICT construction equipment and remote operation are emerging, base machines are key to providing our customers with the best possible solution. We are working on quality assurance with an emphasis on the solid production of highly reliable base machines. Even with the addition of functions based on new technologies, the concept and methods of quality control itself remain fundamentally the same. In addition, the Quality Assurance Division has set a goal of becoming No. 1 in the industry in terms of customer satisfaction by 2030, and I would like to do my utmost to bring out even better products to achieve this goal.

Sakamoto: When we think from the customer's perspective, what we want to avoid above all is customer dissatisfaction. That is why, for example, if there is a defect in a product, we thoroughly analyze the root cause of the defect and make sure that the defect will not occur again. Although testing and inspections are not directly profit-generating work from an objective point of view, I feel every day that this is a company that fully understands the importance of such work. We will continue to evaluate products from a strict perspective and engage in quality assurance work with the spirit of protecting the safety and security of our customers.

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