Customer Health & Safety

11 min

It is our aim to make access in our customers’ lives seamless, smart, and secure. End user health and safety is therefore a top priority and an inherent part of our business plans.

Why it matters

For us as one of the top three global access control and security solutions companies, customer health and safety is fundamental to our sense of product responsibility. By identifying and minimizing all possible risks of our products – including those arising from harmful materials or potentially endangering functional features – we ensure the safety of our customers and end users.

Key activities

It is our aim to make access in our customers’ lives seamless, smart, and secure. End-user health and safety is therefore a top priority and an inherent part of our business plans. Public buildings must meet high standards in terms of public health and safety, as well as for our built-in products and solutions. dormakaba meets these product and customer requirements with product certifications for internationally recognized standards such as from the European Standard (EN), American National Standards Institute (ANSI), or Deutsches Institut für Normung (DIN). We pay particular attention to the DIN 18040 standards, which apply to barrier-free construction in public buildings. Furthermore, ISO 9001 processes ensure that quality management requirements are continuously monitored and improved.

Our product management team is responsible for this work, in close consultation with product development, as required by the Group Directive Adaptive Innovation Methodology (AIM) and defined by Group Innovation Management. Our product quality assurance process, which includes both internal and external resources, ensures that our products have all necessary labels. No product can be installed in-field or released for production without the appropriate certification in hand. This is a necessary step in the product development life cycle, i.e., the product verification phase based on AIM. In our business units and at our production sites, ISO 9001 processes are implemented locally and managed by local quality assurance managers.

To ensure product- and solution-specific customer health and safety, business segments develop adequate action plans:

  1. Access Solutions segments
  2. Key & Wall Solutions segment

Access Solutions segments

Our Access Solutions (AS) segments provide products such as escape routes, entrance systems, and hotel access systems. we work to address fire safety, electromagnetic interference, and hazardous substances, as well as the need to ensure emergency exits open following a power failure. To ensure customer health and safety, our business addresses these topics through the following activities:

In case of emerging risks and customer complaints, we have a Group-wide customer complaint process in place based on the principles of ease of access, solution-driven expertise, short response times, positivity, and focus on our value “Customer First”.

The process follows five steps:

  1. Acknowledge that the customer has an issue, ideally within 24 hours.
  2. Assess the problem, prioritize and find a solution driver.
  3. Resolve the issue.
  4. Respond in a timely manner, keeping the customer informed of the status.
  5. Conclude with a proper follow-up to assess the customer’s satisfaction and integrate lessons learned.

Regulatory compliance is at the top of the list of priorities for any product development leader and requires immediate action plans. An incident response plan is also put in place to enable direct access to the required resources.

Key & Wall Solutions segment

Our Key & Wall Solutions segment provides product categories such as automotive solutions, keys, and space-dividing solutions. Both business units, Key Systems and Movable Walls, have individual approaches to customer health and safety that are product-specific:

In addition to the Group-wide customer complaint process, the ISO 9001 quality system within Key Systems includes a further grievance mechanism. Each production site implements its ISO 9001 processes locally. Quality assurance managers have ownership of the grievance mechanism and track any complaints from receipt to closure, including feedback to the customer. The steps involved are: registering the complaint in the ticketing system, evaluation, problem analysis and corrective actions, verification, lessons learned, and closure. The intended users of the grievance mechanism are the relevant stakeholders, such as customers, technical assistance, procurement, quality control, logistics, manufacturing, product development, and sales teams. Effectiveness of the grievance mechanism is based on the number of open, accepted, refused, and closed complaints per fiscal year. Additionally, at least once a year, a management review assessment evaluates related KPIs and performance status.

Our performance

To ensure we are on the right track, we internally and externally verify customer health and safety through various certification programs (including ISO 9001), testing, and stakeholder feedback. For example, 53% of reporting sites have achieved ISO 9001 certification.

Examples of contributions to customer health and safety in the financial year 2020/21 included:

In the financial year 2020/21, there have been no incidents of non-compliance with regulations or voluntary codes concerning the health and safety impacts of products and services that have resulted in a fine, penalty, or written warning.

Outlook

We will continue our efforts to ensure customer health & safety in relation to the use of our products. Planned projects and initiatives include:

MaterialsOutro

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