Our "zero customer complaints" strategy applied worldwide

At Verallia, we pride ourselves on manufacturing high-quality glass food packaging for the demanding food and beverage markets. We have long established the rules that make it possible to meet food safety objectives, which means eliminating defects in the bottles and jars we manufacture. To this end, ever more sophisticated control technologies are being implemented on the production lines. This allows us to anticipate and mitigate risks that may affect product quality. As the European market leader and the world’s 3rd largest producer of glass packaging for beverages and food products, this is a responsibility we take on towards our customers and end consumers.

Our ambition is excellence. Therefore our quality strategy aims to achieve “zero customer complaints”. Beyond glass defects, we are focused on eliminating damage that could be caused to our products throughout the supply chain. These non-glass defects characterize the packaging problems of our bottles and jars as well as the delivery conditions.

Our customers don’t buy a bottle but pallets, or even entire loads. We are aware that a damaged pallet can cause production delays on our customers’ lines, causing legitimate claims. Adopting a “zero customer complaints” strategy means affirming that we want to meet the growing demands of our customers by deploying a continuous improvement approach. This is based on a massive and effective practice of problem solving, the formalization and capitalization of the experience acquired, the mastery of the manufacturing processes of our products, as well as the evaluation and anticipation of risks.

Verallia’s “zero customer complaints” strategy is deployed in the group’s 35 production sites around the world. It is broken down into a quality improvement plan that focuses on three pillars: the deployment of the quality culture, compliance with regulations and the achievement of operational excellence with the objective of “getting it right the first time”.

• Quality culture: we deploy the RCA (root cause analysis) method in all our factories. It is a rigorous approach to analyzing the root causes of defect occurrence or non-detection based on the collection of reliable data and validated facts. Structured and rational, this method contributes to the development of the teams’ skills by capitalizing on the lessons learned from these analyses.
• Regulatory compliance: as a food packaging producer, Verallia has implemented a management system that allows it to operate according to strict international standards. In fact, all of our factories are certified, and the vast majority of them hold FSSC 22000 or BRC certifications, representing the highest level of certification recognized by the Global Food Safety Initiative.
• Operational excellence: providing safe and reliable glass food packaging is an essential lever of satisfaction and trust for our customers. Beyond that, quality production generates less waste and polluting emissions. The quality strategy thus contributes to the reduction of the Group’s environmental impacts and carbon footprint. Visual quality management is applied with the aim of raising awareness of defects or incidents that may occur in all processes, from the composition of the glass to the palletization of glass jars or bottles and their use on our customers’ production lines.

As every year, World Quality Day was an opportunity for our teams to organize educational workshops to support our improvement plan but also to invite customers and suppliers. It was an opportunity to share with them our ambition and the programs implemented to promote, train and deploy continuous improvement on these subjects.

© Franck DUNOUAU