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| Sony is wholeheartedly committed to improving product and service quality from the customer's viewpoint with the aim of maintaining and enhancing customers' trust, confidence and satisfaction. This reflects Sony's belief that its most important goal is to remain a highly trusted partner for its customers. |
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Philosophy and Policy
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Since the start of its operations, Sony has given top priority to providing customer oriented, high-quality products and services as an operating foundation. This philosophy is set forth in the Founding Prospectus drafted in 1946 by Sony's co-founder, Masaru Ibuka.
The Sony Group Code of Conduct, established in May 2003, compels Sony to continuously seek ways to comply with or exceed legally mandated standards in all aspects of its business activities to ensure the safety and satisfaction of customers who use its products and/or services.
To instill this philosophy more firmly, in January 2007 Sony formulated the Sony Pledge of Quality, which lays out Sony's basic policy on product and service quality in the Electronics business. |
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Reinforcing Sony's Quality Control System
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Sony is endeavoring to introduce new product quality improvement measures into all processes, from development, planning, design and manufacturing to sales and service activities. Such measures include:
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establishing the position of Corporate Executive in Charge of Product Quality and Safety, who is responsible for managing and overseeing efforts to improve product and service quality and safety and to respond to quality and safety issues; |
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appointing personnel within each product and business group who are ultimately responsible for quality to spearhead initiatives in the areas for which they are responsible; |
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holding regular Quality Strategy Meetings, which consist of Sony's president and top management from each business group, including manufacturing and marketing executives from the Electronics business, to discuss and set policies, strategies and key measures relating to product quality; and |
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formulating corporate quality standards applied to Sony's electronics products, focusing on such criteria as product safety and performance, labeling and services. These standards are updated continuously to reflect technological advances, changes in applicable legal and regulatory requirements and social changes. |
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Customer Feedback
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Sony makes active use of customer feedback to improve its products. Complaints, suggestions, ideas and reports of malfunctions received from customers at the Customer Information Center after purchase are promptly and accurately evaluated and disseminated to the planning and design groups so that improvements in product quality can be made in a timely fashion.
A case involving certain Sony DVD recorders provides a good example. In response to customer feedback, from March 2007 in Japan, Sony began shipping these units with improved, easier to understand user manuals that outline how to use all basic functions. |
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| Utilizing Customer Feedback |
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Product Quality Information Channel
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It is vital to detect product quality-related problems early. Sony therefore established the Product Quality Information Channel in 2003 to gather product quality-related information, including reports of problems, as well as opinions from Sony Group employees. Employees can send messages to the Product Quality Information Channel website. This can be done when, during the course of their work, they discover a problem related to product quality that they cannot solve or deal with or when a quality-related problem occurs while they are using a Sony product. After the Product Quality Information Channel conducts fact-finding studies regarding the information gathered, it proposes and introduces measures to avoid potential problems and prevent previous problems from recurring.
As of April 30, 2007, Sony had received a cumulative total of more than 1,000 reports since the establishment of the Product Quality Information Channel. The diverse range of information received has included proposals to make products and manuals more user-friendly, and has led to more than 700 improvements. |
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| Breakdown of Product Quality Improvements |
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(As of April 30, 2007) |
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Incorporating Medical Considerations into Product Safety Improvements
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| As part of its effort to improve the safety of its products, Sony has established an in-house product safety assurance capability for examining product safety from a medical perspective, to help ensure Sony products have no adverse effects on human health.The results of these efforts, as well as advice from experts outside the company, are then incorporated into product development with new technology, design and engineering processes. |
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Responses to Quality Issues
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Sony recognizes that ensuring its customers' total trust, confidence and satisfaction is a crucial management task and strives to prevent quality-related problems through the systems and efforts described previously. Accordingly, Sony respond swiftly when a problem arises by investigating the facts, disclosing information to customers and taking appropriate countermeasures.
In fiscal 2006, Sony launched a global replacement program for certain notebook computer battery packs using Sony-manufactured lithium-ion battery cells. Sony initiated this program as a measure of its commitment to ensuring customer satisfaction and alleviating any consumer concern that may have arisen as a result of voluntary recalls by certain computer manufacturers in 2006 of notebook batteries containing Sony cells that, under certain rare conditions, may overheat. As part of its ongoing effort to improve product quality, Sony made several improvements that had an additional safety benefit to the battery design and manufacturing process of covered battery cells, most of which had been implemented before the replacement program. In addition to processing and disposing of recovered batteries in compliance with the laws and regulations of each country and in a manner that exerted as little impact as possible on the environment, Sony took active steps to recycle metals.
Also in the period under review, it was discovered that a certain model of portable radio that has been on the market since 1999 did not meet certain standards set forth in Japan's Electrical Appliance and Material Safety Law. Accordingly, Sony informed customers and implemented a recall. Sony is currently taking steps company-wide to strengthen efforts to incorporate compliance with laws and standards governing product safety into in-house processes.
In September 2006, Sony introduced rules within its worldwide operations concerning the immediate transmission to the Corporate Executive in Charge of Product Quality and Safety of any information that comes into our possession about product-related incidents or other matters that can affect customer safety. The executive uses this information to investigate as appropriate and address the issues with the related operating groups. |
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Efforts to Ensure Product Information Security
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| The networking of consumer electronics products in recent years has increased the danger of, among others, the leakage of personal information and the destruction of data. As a consequence, ensuring the information security of such products has become an important issue. In addition to establishing a special function for collecting security risk-related information from outside experts, Sony has created an internal information security team comprised of individuals assigned to each business group. Based on information received, this team assesses the potential impact on Sony products and implements appropriate measures. |
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