Paris, June 16, 2023, Every year since 1992, France Qualité, the benchmark association for professionals in Quality, risk management and continuous improvement, has been awarding the “Prix Nationaux de la Qualité” (National Quality Awards) to a dozen winners from all over France (companies, institutions, students and authors) for their best practices/works. Among the 9 winners of the 2023 edition, MANUPLAST won the Best Practices Award – SME category, which rewards an outstanding approach to be disseminated.
The issue
In 2017, MANUPLAST experienced a difficult year from an external quality point of view, with numerous customer non-conformities; in 2018, its non-quality costs (NCQ) amounted to more than 10% of its sales. MANUPLAST’ management then decided to deploy an improvement plan through its processes.
Our approach
The members of the Executive Committee draw up a policy that enables each “process pilot” to deploy actions focused on 5 main areas:
- Standards: creation or updating of company standards with users. Objective: to simplify, make more accessible and trace the elements required to maintain performance.
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Quality tools: introduction or improvement of rituals for unit control, operator decision-making, problem-solving and auditing.
- Training: after initial external training, internal takeover and half-yearly training courses, technical support to make processes more reliable, and mentoring on quality tools.
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Methods: strategic actions focused on the objective measurement of profitability to prioritize actions, and a complete overhaul of the Industrialization process in order to produce right the first time.
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Technical solutions: OPTIMA, the real-time system developed by the company, has become a supervisory tool. A major investment and modernization plan, already implemented previously, was re-launched, notably with the design and installation of vision control.
This set of projects was implemented in the company’s various processes, with the participation not only of their pilots, but also of all personnel at all levels.
The result
Thanks to this collective commitment, by 2022 MANUPLAST will have a non-quality cost ratio of 7.63%. Its employees remain satisfied and motivated in their work, as demonstrated by their quarterly survey results (+17%).In addition, the company is increasing its earnings and achieving the target set by management of 5% profitability by the end of 2022, thanks to an increase in sales to almost 9.4 million euros from 8.1 million in 2017.
