David Duffy visits a factory which has been officially declared totally faultless

Production may have temporarily ground to a halt at the Cowley car works, but anyone who fears British manufacturing is dead and buried should think again. A few hundred yards from BMW's nascent new Mini plant, history is in the making.

Unipart's latest factory, set up less than two years ago as a joint venture with Japanese engineering firm Yutaka and Honda, has just achieved one of the highest accolades in world-class manufacturing. Deliberately tucked away behind Unipart's group headquarters at Cowley, Unipart Yutaka Systems factory started life in 1998. From its earliest days, its output of car parts - mainly exhaust systems for Honda - ran at high levels of international quality, producing parts with 140 faults per million. Last year the UYS figure was 40 parts per million. So far this year it is nil.

Perfect quality is not achieved by accident. Mr Andrew Farmer, director and general manager of UYS, said: "In 16 months we went from a muddy field to a world-class supplier. That needs commitment from the top down.

"The first and most important thing we did was to ensure that we had senior management commitment to providing the resource, and the personal time and effort required of them to ensure that quality was built into everything that we did.

"Once we could demonstrate this, we could begin to create the right culture and environment to consistently ensure the highest levels of quality."

The company set about building quality into the production process, which follows a simple material flow through the factory. It also paid special attention to the interior of the factory with good lighting and ventilation. Nothing in the eerily clean plant is there by chance.

Staff wear dark blue T-shirts to symbolise the Unipart involvement, machines are painted light blue to mark the research and development input from Yutaka and the walls are white, denoting Honda's involvement in the project.

Mr Farmer said: "We took the best Japanese working practices and adapted them to suit our way of working. We call it 'efficiency with a human face'."

Whatever it's called, it seems to work. The incredible level of quality has been achieved with a workforce largely drawn from the Oxford Automotive Components factory in North Oxford, which is being closed down.

Mr Farmer said: "That put us in the unique position of having a greenfield site with an experienced workforce. What we have found is that everyone wants to do more than just their job. We offer training so that everyone can reach their full potential."

Most companies have seen their share of highly-paid consultants babbling management speak, plastering walls with wishbone diagrams and pareto charts for a few weeks, but having little real long-term effect on the business.

Mr Farmer said Unipart's approach was different because it took the best that quality improvement systems had to offer, tailored them to real life and stuck with them.

He said: "You need persistence for these ideas to pay off and you can't achieve what we have simply by having a consultant come in for a couple of days, sitting everyone down and then doing nothing as a follow up."

Mr Farmer has just returned from Japan, where he has been studying Japanese. Most of the 95 staff working at UYS speak some Japanese but Mr Farmer is determined to become fluent to ease his dealings with customers.

Those customers may, in the future, extend beyond the Honda group. At the moment the plant is building components for Honda's family-sized Accord model, which is built at Swindon. The factory, which houses a mighty 1200-tonne press, is currently preparing for the introduction of the new Civic model at Swindon early next year, including the use of innovative 360-degree pivoting robots which will be able to quickly and easily switch between Accord and Civic parts production, with minimum interruption.

The quality achieved at the Cowley factory last year was enough to win UYS a coveted Achievement in Quality award from Honda, acknowledged as one of the hardest taskmasters in the world in the quest for quality.

The award recognises that UYS has been rated as one of Honda's best suppliers for the entire year.

Since the Cowley factory opened, the company has also achieved the international quality standard ISO 9002 and is on target for the even tougher standard QS 9000 for 2001. It also scooped an Oxfordshire Special Conservation award, Investors in People and was one of only 50 companies worldwide to win a Sword of Honour for its work on safety. Mr Farmer added: "I think this is a tribute to all the hard work and effort that has been put in by every member of the UYS team.

"What we can't afford to do for a second is relax. We know there are other people out there who not only want to match what we have achieved, but want to beat it and do that at a lower cost.

"We must constantly look to the future. It's the only way to survive."

**First published in The Oxford Times, 14.7.00