-1.00Mars Chocolate awards DS Smith quality performance
For the second consecutive year DS Smith has won 2 quality awards from Mars Chocolate. The winning plants are DS Smith Nördlingen and Darlington.
On Thursday 28th April, Mars Chocolate invited their main packaging suppliers to their quality awards dinner in Hampshire in the UK. This award is a clear praise for those suppliers who are committed to delivering consistently high quality to Mars Chocolate sites. It is a prestigious sign of recognition supported at the highest level in Mars. Guest speakers at this event were the European Chocolate President, Peter West and the Commercial Vice President, Pascal Baltussen.
The award comes with prize money which is based on quality penalties paid by the suppliers. As performance across the whole supply base improved this year, Mars topped up the prize money to 10,000 € per category. The award for exceptional performance in the corrugated category was presented to Michael Cronin, Stephen McAneny & Frank McCusker on behalf of Nördlingen & Darlington. Each site will receive 3,333 €, and it is up to the local site to decide on what the money will be spend on as long as it is to the benefit off the staff who made it happen.
Ros Hamilton, Mars Vendor Assurance Manager, was extremely complimentary of the fantastic progress on quality by all DS Smith sites over the past 3 years and she was also very positive about the Quality Excellence Initiative.
Marc Boel who leads our Quality Excellence program confirms: “Quality is about customer satisfaction. One of the key elements is to deliver the expected quality to the customer. In this area we can differentiate ourselves from the competition. Our Quality Excellence programme and the execution of the action plans are on track and have already delivered a 35% reduction of the defect rate versus last year. This clearly brings real value to our customers. Quality requirements embedded in the total value stream and in our daily operations is the guarantee for sustainable success!”