FEATURE
Quality initiatives at TowerJazz
Ilan Rabinovich, Worldwide Senior Vice President of Quality and Reliability
In recent years, TowerJazz has been one of the fastest growing pure-play specialty foundries, including both organic and non-organic growth, with multiple sites, technology diversity and a large and growing customer base. The joint venture with Panasonic, established in 2014, added another dimension to our activities, with enhanced technology offerings as well as additional manufacturing sites that will use existing TowerJazz processes. With this growth and with the variability of worldwide personnel, work methodologies and customer interfaces, there is a need to ensure that high quality material and high quality customer service are maintained throughout the organization.
High quality requires adaption of best quality practices as well as alignment across all cultures and sites, and it is an integration challenge for each manager and functional team. In order to meet our many objectives and make sure customers’ requirements are met, it is essential that each individual and each team meets commitments, both ones that are promised to customers and those that are defined as part of the company’s goals. Therefore, we defined a simple, but essential motto that encompasses the entire organization:
With this motto, we have organized quality initiatives throughout the company that are aimed at meeting customer needs and improving overall quality and efficiency. We embedded this motto in our day to day activities, as well as in teamwork and projects management.
One of the major benefits that comes with maintaining global facilities is the possibility to use best practices among our different sites, select the better ones, and improve overall efficiency and effectiveness. The Quality Team has taken the lead on defining methodologies that will benefit from this integration. Japanese culture inherited from TPSCo, and most importantly Japanese view of quality, provides an excellent opportunity to improve overall quality across the organization.
In 2016, we plan to implement elements of Japanese mentality and make it a dominant part of our DNA. In addition, we plan to implement global methodologies and practices that will be common to all sites, provide a common language in the company, and aim to achieve best results for our customers and employees. We believe that such procedures will keep TowerJazz at the forefront of the specialty foundries.
