Enhanced Quality Assurance through Visible Progress: A Continuous Improvement Cycle
Established
March 30, 1939
No. of Employees
2,051 (As of March 31, 2025)
Main Business
Alumina, aluminum hydroxide, various chemical products, and aluminum ingots and alloys: manufacturing and sales; aluminum sheet products, transportation-related products, electronic materials, and other products: manufacturing and sales.
User Department
Kambara Electric Materials Center, Quality Assurance Group
Overview of Company and Department Roles
The Quality Assurance Group at Nippon Light Metal Co., Ltd.’s Kambara Electric Materials Center is responsible for maintaining quality assurance systems, issuing inspection reports, and managing customer complaints. They work closely with other departments, such as Production and Technology, to implement improvements based on identified issues.
The ultimate goal is to establish a system that ensures we constantly deliver products that meet our customers’ needs.
Challenges Before Implementing Questetra BPM Suite
The Quality Assurance Group is responsible for quickly addressing and correcting operational issues. However, response times were often slow, and problem resolution took considerable time.
A primary reason for this was the lack of visibility into the progress of individual tasks, making it difficult to share status updates. It was difficult to identify stalled tasks and their specific bottlenecks. Additionally, relying on paper and email for information exchange led to time-consuming and inefficient data entry, transcription, and approval processes.
Discovery and Selection of Questetra BPM Suite
As the company proceeded with business reforms through DX, we considered introducing a tool that could visualize business processes.
Questetra BPM Suite stood out because it not only manages business operations but also transforms them into a flow, enabling continuous process improvement.
The platform allows us to visualize operations and improve processes, while its no-code flexibility empowers our on-site personnel to design and manage applications. We were also impressed by its ability to quickly identify bottlenecks and improvement areas using heatmaps and process search functions. These factors led to the decision to implement Questetra.
Solution and Implementation of Questetra BPM Suite
During the initial implementation phase, a team of five members from the DX Promotion Team spearheaded the effort, starting with an attendance reporting application. Building a system for automatic attendance report tallying helped them grasp Questetra’s basic operations and design principles. This success opened their eyes to Questetra’s potential for improving their everyday tasks.
Subsequently, the Quality Assurance Group organized operations such as handling complaints, managing calibrations, and registering drawings, systematically converting them into Questetra applications. Questetra provided assistance with some initial application development, which deepened our understanding of modeling methods and design concepts. Now, we are confident in our ability to independently develop applications.
We have created approximately 20 applications, and about 10 are already in active use. While Questetra currently covers a portion of our overall scope, we intend to expand its reach and transform it into a central mechanism for quality assurance operations.
Benefits of Implementation
Questetra has enabled us to visualize the status of our operations, allowing us to respond and follow up promptly with an accurate understanding of progress. This has clarified bottlenecks in execution and helped us identify areas for process improvement. Moreover, transitioning from paper-based and email processes to an online application has significantly improved operational efficiency by reducing time spent on complex data entry and transcription.
Furthermore, Questetra’s web form functionality allows us to collect information from individuals without Questetra accounts, leading to more active discussions about on-site improvements. In the future, we plan to encourage younger employees to take the lead in application development, further simplifying the reporting and improvement proposal processes, thus expanding field-led improvements.
Valuable Features of Questetra BPM Suite
The heatmap and process search functions, providing clear progress visualization, are effectively used to prioritize improvement efforts. The web form function allows us to easily receive reports from team members who do not have Questetra accounts.
We are also utilizing Questetra’s AI Agent function to add an automatic reply generation feature to our time and attendance application, further enhancing on-site efficiency.
Looking ahead, we are exploring the implementation of a system that uses AI to automatically aggregate and analyze collected data for quality enhancement purposes.
Message to Companies Facing Similar Challenges
Quality assurance and ISO compliance require continuous improvement—not just system implementation. It’s crucial to identify and address business challenges constantly. Starting with small app deployments and accumulating success stories on-site is the first step towards continuous enhancement.
Questetra BPM Suite is a tool that not only manages work but also drives it forward, fostering movement and autonomy in the field and naturally accelerating improvements.
(This case is based on information at the time of the interview.)
