Ensuring Product Safety

The Yamaha Group believes that the safety of its products, services and facilities falls under the concept of fundamental quality that must be provided.
The Group define how we ensure the safety of products and services in our Compliance Code of Conduct. To put this into practice, we are working to organize the structure, and strengthen design processes towards essential safe design.

• 1-2 Ensuring Safety of Products and Services

The Yamaha Group endeavors to ensure and improve product safety through the safety-conscious designing of products, and correspondence to safety inspections and Laws and Regulations related to its products.

The Yamaha Group pursues safety-conscious designing of its products, and its efforts include incorporating a risk assessment process into the design review at the time of development.
Through the risk assessment process, we identify and hypothesize potential risks involved in each product and manner of using it, allowing us to consider the minimization or removal of these risks during the product design process.
In fiscal 2017,　we introduced the "R-Map," method^*, an internationally recognized risk assessment process. We are proceeding with activities to further enhance the efficiency of our risk assessment activities.

The Yamaha Corporation Quality Assurance Division conducts labeling confirmation and safety inspections of the Yamaha Group’s major products (approx. 40 products per year) that are actually being sold, and provides feedback of the results to the department in charge, and strives to improve safety.

Yamaha monitors trends in information for regulations and has decided on an internal policy and developed a structure for full compliance with each country’s regulations and standards pertaining to product quality and safety as well as environmental protection through the cooperation with local group companies.
Based on recent year’s strengthening standards that apply to electromagnetic waves, Yamaha Corporation has installed electromagnetic wave measurement equipment and various other kinds of measurement, analysis and evaluation equipment,　to evaluate products for compliance with respect to the regulations of relevant countries at this facility. Regulations for chemical substances have also become more stringent in each country, and in line with this, Yamaha has created and implemented a management system for chemical substances contained in products and established its own Standards for Chemical Content in Products. These standards have been used to manage chemical substances in products during design and development and have helped facilitate legal compliance as well as minimize the environmental impact of products. The standards undergo revisions as and when necessary, in response to legislative expansion and change, the accession of voluntary standards and other factors.

The Yamaha Group has put in place a system that places top priority on ensuring the safety of customers. In the event of a product safety issue in the marketplace, employees who receive notification of a safety problem report it immediately to the responsible department and the Quality Assurance Department. The department that receives the report immediately notifies top management of the occurrence of an issue. At the same time, the head of the Quality Assurance Department convenes the relevant departments from across the company, moving to respond to affected customers, notify the appropriate government authorities, and initiate measures aimed at preventing recurrence.

Since 2010, The Yamaha Group has initiated product safety training courses in human resource training in efforts to prevent product safety issues from arising. In addition to introducing case studies of specific safety issues, the Group has commenced training courses in essential safety design policies as well as statutory and regulatory requirements with respect to product safety. During the seven years between fiscal 2011 and fiscal 2017, there were approximately 664 hours of lectures attended by a total of 161 employees comprised mainly of engineers and personnel from development areas.

In fiscal 2017 one recall due to an accident involving a Yamaha product occurred.
In July 2016, an accident involving a lock-in inside a wooden soundproof slide door occurred, and Yamaha initiated a recall to inspect and repair the defect in November. The inspection was 97% complete by the end of March 2017, and was 100% complete by the end of May.
Two regulation violations regarding product safety were discovered (nonuse of fire-retarding material, excess amount of lead contained in paint), of which were corresponded with appropriate measures. No damage to customers due to these issues have occurred so far.

• Product Information Disclosure (Situation Regarding Incidents such as Product Defects)