Quality

As a leading provider of innovative chemicals and plastic solutions, Borealis looks back at more than 50 years of experience. With tomorrow in focus, the business groups Polyolefins, Hydrocarbons and NITRO (Fertilizer and Melamine), will continue to excel in quality and reliability whilst offering products that enhance society in general and address global challenges in particular.

Borealis aims to meet its customers’ expectations with a focus on quality in terms of product reliability and delivery. In compliance with industry-accepted standards, the company promotes a zero-defect mindset and strives to continuously improve its best practices. Together with its customers and partners, Borealis seeks nimble solutions to fulfil their today’s and future needs.

To achieve this, the following core processes are in place:

• A well-established integrated management system for quality, health, safety, environment and energy. The compliance of this management system is monitored by performance indicators and regularly reviewed through internal audits and management system reviews with top management involvement. Compliance is also certified externally via the relevant ISO standard certifications (see section below);
• A company-wide system and process for continuous improvement to drive learning and best practice sharing beyond the commonplace standards;
• Customer satisfaction levels monitored regularly via customer surveys and by deriving improvement actions from an integrated complaint management system.

Managing quality: The Borealis Management System

Borealis' commitment to quality leadership is reinforced by the creation of its quality policy implemented company-wide. The policy is part of the Borealis Management System, which brings all policies, procedures, processes and instructions together in one place. This system is complemented by competence building as well as sharing know-how and expertise through eLearnings, new employee introductions and continuous awareness, e.g. via a complaint and quality incident action monitoring system.

Continuously improving: The Borealis Way

The Borealis Way (TBW) is a five step process model to continuously improve the way the company operates and handles challenges and opportunities. The five steps of the TBW process are: Define, Analyse, Solve, Implement and Review. TBW methodology is the recommended way to improve products, services and processes within Borealis. It is used for complex projects but also for small improvements at local production and logistic sites. This supports the company’s guiding principle that continuous improvement is the responsibility of each employee to ultimately drive quality and customer satisfaction.

Meeting customer needs

Borealis’ aim is to have satisfied customers as they are the foundation of the company’s success. Customer satisfaction in Borealis is measured in a 2-step approach. The basic monitoring is ensured by a set of performance indicators on delivery performance, which include – but are not limited to – Delivery to Request (DTR), Delivery to Promise (DTP) and Overall Asset Effectiveness (OAE).

• Delivery performance is how Borealis’ customers perceive the reliability of its supply chain execution. DTR indicates whether the customer received the correct order. DTP indicates whether the promise of on-time delivery was kept. Borealis believes it is only as good as its last delivery!
• OAE is used to measure the efficiency of production installations and assets combined with the ability to sell the volumes to the market. With this approach Borealis links its customers’ demand with the company’s production planning to ensure the supply chain to customers is being filled with the products ordered.

Next to these performance indicators, Borealis measures annually the customer loyalty measurement with the Net Promoter Score (NPS). The NPS is a broadly used tool to measure customer satisfaction and assists us in deriving concrete improvement actions from customer feedback. The accurate monitoring of these measurements and the thorough implementation of derived actions enables Borealis to continuously improve its business interaction with the customers along the entire customer journey.

Providing excellent customer support

Despite a tightly integrated set of controls before, during and after production, customers might still not be fully satisfied with the products and services Borealis delivers. In such cases, Borealis uses a formalised customer complaint handling process, recognising that effective complaint handling can enhance its reputation, customer relationships and customer satisfaction, even when it has initially not lived up to the customer’s full expectations. Each complaint is taken seriously, registered, investigated and seen as an opportunity to learn. The information obtained through the complaint handling process therefore helps Borealis to improve its products, services and processes.

Complying to standards whilst striving for excellence: quality standards and certifications

Securing the quality of products and services is supported by compliance with industry-accepted standards. Being certified to standards such as ISO implicates that Borealis is periodically audited by an external organisation. These external audits provide an independent confirmation that Borealis applies best practices in its daily activities. Embedding ISO standards also requires Borealis to continuously improve, which ultimately generates more value for customers and other stakeholders. Borealis is certified for its key activities according to ISO 9001 (Quality), ISO 14001 (Environmental) OHSAS 18001 (Health & Safety) and ISO 50001 (Energy). IATF 16949:2016 (Quality Management System for Automotive suppliers) applies to plants manufacturing products for the automotive industry, while Fertilizer Europe certifies the fertilizer business for selected locations.

A detailed overview of certified locations and the related scope is published here.