Spanish factory a Bridgestone TQM award recipient

Bridgestone Corporation held its third annual Bridgestone Global Total Quality Management (TQM) Conference on Friday, 14 September, at the company's Global Manufacturing Education Center (G-MEC) building in Kodaira City, Tokyo. The motto for this year's event was "Standards are Our Guiding Principle,” and a focus was placed upon ‘kaizen’ – the Japanese word describing improvement or change for the better – throughout the Bridgestone Group. In that context, Bridgestone Europe’s Burgos plant in Spain was given a TQM award, in particular thanks to “open and close standard based kaizen” in the plant’s curing department.”

Bridgestone describes the initiative in Burgos as one that aims at higher efficiency based on cycle reduction, through the standardisation of each step of each press operation. This is ensured by a daily control of operations supported by a new system, the “Bridgestone Open and Close Analyser” (BOCA), which automatically collects data to measure and analyse operations, an easily transferrable technology.

During the conference’s closing ceremony, Bridgestone Global COO, Kazuhisa Nishigai, commented that he was impressed by the Burgos plant as its activities may lead to an overall improvement in performance if they are shared and implemented by all Bridgestone tyre plants around the globe.

Bridgestone Europe’s CEO, Franco Annunziato, and COO, Mike Shimazaki, also congratulated the Burgos team, particularly considering that “this award has been obtained in a difficult economic context in Europe. This achievement stands as solid evidence of the capability and commitment of Bridgestone Europe to turn around the situation through true team work philosophy.”

In addition to the Burgos plant, TQM awards were given to Bridgestone’s Kanto, Kurume and Amagi plants in Japan, while its Hofu plant in Japan and Huizhou plant in China each received an Award of Impression.