Yoshito Suzuki
Quality control department - Manager

- What is your role at Kawai?
I’m responsible for the unification and management of the quality control divisions and ensuring only top quality products are being produced. This includes, early solutions to defects, rooting out and solving key causes of defects and to constantly generate ideas on how to ensure defects do not occur.

- What is your favorite aspect of working at Kawai?
Kawai is a company that supports and promotes new ideas and this is very attractive to me. Furthermore, there is a strong relationship amongst employees and if I need help solving a problem my co-workers will be eager to help.

- As an employee, what do you think Kawai's strong points are?
I believe that at Kawai we have the ability to develop strong relationships and offer high service, because at our core this is what we want. This has helped us reach out to multiple foreign countries with great success. On the technological side, I believe our strength comes from original designs and strong technological knowledge.

- You deal with quality on a daily basis, what does quality mean to you and how does it relate to Kawai?
I believe quality is very important in this industry. I believe this because a high quality heater can play a large role determining whether a customer’s operations are successful or not. And at Kawai we have a strong, multi-step quality control process to ensure we can consistently offer top-quality products to meet our customers’ demands.

- How do you ensure you can consistently offer top-quality products?
There are two ways we focus on this, the first one being product quality and the second being process quality. Product quality involves constant inspection and data recording to make sure our products are always top quality. While process quality involves schedule control, cost control, change-control and human management. Together these allow us at Kawai to consistently produce high quality products that satisfy our customers demands.
I know this sounds too extreme, but the ideal manufacturing system would be the one which would not have quality control department, I believe. Without us, products would always meet, with no exception, a customer’s requirements. As long as we are a manufacturer, it would never happen, but that’s what we should aim for.