Quality Management
Our ISO9001-certified quality management systems are at the heart of our manufacturing processes!
NEC has dedicated Quality Management Systems in place for both of its factories — in Brownsville, Texas for the manufacture of new high voltage stator coils, as well as Columbus, Ohio for the manufacture and installation of new and refurbished field windings. NEC has always had a philosophy embracing complete customer satisfaction and continuous improvement. So we are proud to have achieved official ISO 9001 certification of our quality management systems in Brownsville in 2005. View our current certificate for Brownsville.
Our quality management systems assist us in identifying and recording manufacturing deviations, investigating root cause and implementing counter measures to prevent recurrences. We maintain a completely open environment, allowing any interested customer to visit our plant to monitor the production of their contracted work during manufacture. Related quality assurance records are always open and available to the customer.
Daily Progress Reports on Installation Work
In addition to standardized Quality Inspection Process (QIP) documentation, NEC uses its daily report system to provide both its customers with up-to-date information of project progress. These concise reports, compiled by the project's lead quality inspector, include pictures and relevant comments about both the progress of the work and any related engineering, installation, schedule or safety issues. Additional comments, clarifications or updates from other team members may be added when our project managers transmit them to the customer's engineer-in-charge.
Active Link Between Quality & Innovation
Our quality management systems provide a framework of process management, data collection for our manufacturing innovations. One such innovation is the 900-degree Roebel transposition that NEC developed and implemented for certain stator bar designs. This Roebel assists greatly in reducing circulating current losses down to the lowest possible levels. But it is also a challenging manufacturing feat, and not all suppliers have implemented it as successfully as we have. And with these quality systems in place, we can also confidently manufacture a three-turn half coil with Kapton® and enamel strand insulation for another customer, even though it is a coil we don't make every day, or we can just as easily tweak a standard coil design to be more responsive to the spark erosion problems plaguing certain types of large air-cooled generators.
