Quality, the environment and safety form the holy trinity of corporate activities. When Kiilto Oy, a Finnish chemical industry company, set out to create an integrated quality system at the beginning of the 1990s, the company had one single quality handbook in 1993 in which all three elements were taken into account, - "When a quality system is developing all the time, a long history becomes an advantage," says Antti Nieminen, the deputy managing director.

Kiilto Oy, a Finnish family company established in 1919, specializes in developing, producing and marketing adhesives and products closely related to them. At the heart of the operations is know-how in adhesives i.e. the comprehensive solving of a customer's adhesion problem. This stretches to other closely related work stages such as priming, water proofing, surface finish and care.

Kiilto's customers include the building products industry, furniture and woodworking industries, paper processing and packaging industries, footwear industry, iron and steel foundries and, through the products of the subsidiary KiiltoClean, the professional cleaning sector and private consumers.

The ISO 9001 certificate covers product development, production, marketing, distribution and the customer service, storage and materials functions. The quality system includes the ISO 14001 environmental system, BS 8800 safety system and the principles of the chemical industry's Responsible Care environmental, health and safety programme.

Customers an important indicator

The watchwords in Kiilto's operations are total quality: each work stage and sub-area affect the final outcome, the quality that is being created and the customer's mental picture. The cornerstones are complete control over the operations, systematic implementation of customers' demands and constant development.

The standard of the quality, environment and safety is monitored and developed regularly by means of the company's own indicators, internal and external audits, inspections and self-assessments based on quality-award criteria. Every three years Kiilto also publishes a report on effects on the environment and safety.

"Total quality includes in practice not only the even quality and competitiveness of the products themselves, but also the correctness and punctuality of our deliveries, proficiency of our training and product guides and all other customer contacts such the correctness of the invoicing, friendliness at the switchboard and efficiency of the debt collection. Each sub-factor has its own indicators which the management monitors closely," Nieminen says.

"The most important indicator, however, is customer satisfaction, which is measured not only in different ways but principally through the actual customer loyalty i.e. purchases," Nieminen stresses.

On the path of constant development

The comprehensive quality idea is a red thread running through the entire company and is made tangible in the form of satisfied customers, the atmosphere at the company and visible success.

Antti Nieminen can easily find many good reasons for Kiilto's success: the commitment of the owners; the product development, which in international terms is of a high standard and well-financed; the staff, who are extremely capable in technical terms and close to the customer; service-minded sales and marketing; the reliability of the deliveries and flexible production; highly developed customer training; the strict watch over finances and efficient systems. The company's own production of raw materials has increased know-how in Kiilto's most important area i.e water-borne and solvent-free products.

"The strengths are not formalities; they are monitored and developed all the time," Nieminen emphasizes.

Common objective is important

Kiilto took the process idea model as the basis for its quality system and controlling all the operations from the autumn of 2002.

Seeing the overall picture is a vital part of process management. "You have to see how the functions are interrelated. It's also managing people: individuals are given the right to think and make decisions. A common objective is one of the most important requirements of process management."

Also extremely important is understanding that the process is not the organization but the organization's way of doing things, in which emphasis is given to customer responsiveness. "An organization's way is to manage what is done from the customer's perspective." Nieminen explains.

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The most important quality indicator for Kiilto Oy, which is based at Lempäälä near Tampere, is customer satisfaction. One of the ways in which this can be seen is customer loyalty.