Quality & Safety

FANUC promotes activities to improve quality in all processes, from development and design of products to product quality buildups and after-sales services following manufacturing and shipment, in an effort to enhance the quality, safety, and reliability of its products.

The Research & Development Promotion / Support Division functions across multiple research & development divisions to ensure the quality and reliability of products and to ensure the prevention and prompt resolution of issues about quality. At the same time, a section devoted to reliability development has been established in each research & development division in each business division engaged in product development and design. In addition, research & development divisions regularly share information on both development and technology in various technology meetings and use such information during development.

Through after-sales services following manufacturing and shipping, we have built a system to feed back reliability issues discovered in the field to production divisions and research & development divisions and to continue improvement through the PDCA cycle.

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FANUC strives to ensure the safety and quality of its products through a quality management system based on ISO 9001. We carry out checks through design review and verification in order to meet the requirements of laws, regulations and standards as well as the requirements of individual customers. In addition, we conduct risk assessments of our products. 

FANUC conducts the following ongoing activities with the aim of improving and enhancing product quality.

We promote the development of a framework to design and manufacture highly reliable products, as well as sharing of knowledge, in order to enhance the reliability development ability of our researchers.

The Research & Development Promotion / Support Division works with members of the reliability development departments in each research & development division to regularly review methods to improve reliability-related issues and proceed with standardising reliability development methodologies.

In addition, the Defect Management Procedures have been established to systematise rules regarding response procedures when defects arise.

All defects that arise are registered in a database called the Defect Record, which centrally manages the entire range of processes, from the investigation of the cause to the measures taken. This allows us to “visualise” the progress of the response and prevent any oversights. The knowledge and lessons of the Defect Record are utilised companywide and have proven to be effective in terms of quality buildup and quality improvement measures, prevention of the occurrence and recurrence of defects, and the education of young engineers. Furthermore, the Reliability Evaluation Building has an area featuring lessons learned from past defects, where actually used products with quality and performance are displayed. This area is used to educate researchers by encouraging them to learn from past failures.

As FANUC products are used in manufacturing sites, they are exposed to extremely harsh environments. In order to ensure that our products can operate stably for long periods of time under these conditions, while contributing to minimising downtime in our customers' factories, we are promoting the standardisation of evaluation tests by conducting them in a variety of surroundings.

The Reliability Evaluation Building, which opened in 2016, has a total floor area of approximately 22,679 square meters (103 meters wide × 198 meters deep), and houses a variety of equipment for thorough reliability verification.

This facility is equipped with dedicated test rooms, such as an anechoic chamber, an EMS (electromagnetic susceptibility) test room, a vibration test room, a mist test room, a variable temperature room, a variable humidity room, a capability limit test room, a noise measurement room, a submergence test room, a clean room, and a precision measurement room. In this facility, a variety of tests are performed while taking into account variations in data under various conditions, including the accelerated life test to evaluate long-term reliability.

FANUC contributes to the improvement of safety and the minimisation of downtime at its customers' factories. To this end, it is essential to enhance product safety in order to protect operators from danger. FANUC engages in research and development to ensure a higher level of safety, and its FA, ROBOT, and ROBOMACHINE products comply with the relevant safety standards.

In line with our “Simple & Smart” design policy and the human-centered design (HCD) concept, we create products that fulfil our users’ requirements and greatly satisfy them, without being deficient or excessive. While complying with ISO, JIS, and local laws and regulations, we aim for designs that seriously take into consideration user-friendliness and safety. We are in the process of formulating related guidelines. Our new collaborative robot CRX, released in December 2019, gives the rough, rugged image of industrial robots a fresh new look. The clean, rounded lines of this novel design offer a soft external appearance that allows the operator to share space with the CRX comfortably.