Quality Reputation

1. The Employee Declaration:
   
   
   • We are committed to being the premier supplier to our customers by:
     
     
     • ­ Providing perfect quality
       We continuously measure our percent of “perfect orders”, which are orders without any issues. We measure all aspects of our shipments: no technical issues, on-time deliveries, errorless paperwork, transportation and packing without issues
       
       
     • ­ Operating with maximum efficiency
       We measure various aspects, including our total costs to sales ratio, the generation of waste to total volume produced, the percent of first-pass batches
       
       
     • ­ Demonstrating leadership in innovation
       We strive to be “the innovator” in the formulated additives industry. Thus we track the number of newly launched technologies, the number of customized products for a given specific customer issue, and we stay in action to exceed 30% of our sales with new products.
       
       
   • We are committed to be a responsible company by:
     
     
     • Being a good neighbor:
       • We continuously train our employees on all regulatory aspects of business: safety, health, environment, product stewardship
       • We strive to minimize waste and pollution. At our manufacturing sites, we maintain regular contacts with key local officials.
       • We encourage employees to support community outreach activities and donations (cancer societies, autism, underprivileged children, world catastrophes [tsunami, earthquakes, …])
         
         
     • Being a good employer:
       • We guarantee our colleagues a safe and healthy workplace, we measure all incidents and we provide regular training.
       • We expect to provide a work environment in where people can find fulfillment.
       • We adhere to high ethical standards in our actions and decisions.
       • We continuously measure indirect employment criteria to assess our success at being a good employer.
         
         
   • We are committed to creating sustainable value
     
     
     • Our goal is to provide our customers with products that provide better technical and commercial value then our competitors.
     • We strive to remain profitable and invest in our future so as to serve our customers for the long term.
     • We measure our success with our sales and profit growth.
       
       
   • We are committed to continuously improving our products and processes
     
     
     • We establish improvement goals and objectives.
     • We measure and evaluate our performance.
     • We take preventative and corrective actions.
   
   
2. Our continuous measurement and tracking methods:
   
   Our major scorecard items are listed in a "dashboard", including:
   
   • Quality:
     • The Perfect Order: Percent of orders without any issues
     • Velocity: The ratio of sales to working capital. Any unfavorable deviation indicates a breakdown in our management processes and their results.
   • Innovation:
     • Ratio of new product sales to total sales.
   • Efficiency:
     • Ratio of total fixed costs to sales
     • Sales per employee
     • Fixed manufacturing cost to volume produced
   • Safety:
     • Lost work days
     • Incidents
   • Sustainable Growth: Sales and profit growth.
     
     
   • We also monitor secondary quality measurements including first pass batches, production quality consistency, number of administrative errors, number of freight issues, etc
     
     
   • In total, we continuously monitor about 50 quality criteria for each business entity.
     
     
3. Preventative and corrective action program
   
   We encourage colleagues to issue preventative or corrective action requests (PAR or CAR). We monitor the number of PAR/CAR's that are created by department. We also measure the number of PAR/CAR's that are mono or multi-functional, and we monitor the speed with which they are resolved.
   
   
4. Employee reward and recognition
   
   We have a "reward and recognition program", which encourages employees for quality behaviors and actions. This program is lead by employees as opposed to "management".
   
   
5. Management Processes
   
   Each business entity has established about 200 management processes which are continuously monitored by:
• Internal audits
• External ISO audits