Meet Jarmo Lillsjö
Working as: Quality and environmental manager
Works at: Proton Finishing Eskilstuna
Jarmo is the quality and environmental manager at Proton Finishing Eskilstuna. Eskilstuna has received a lot of praise for their quality assurance work, what does he think are the pillars of quality work?

Our team is everything, our people are our greatest asset. If we don’t all work towards the same goal, we will never succeed, which is why we place great emphasis on information, training and follow-up. The human factor will always be a risk.
You can minimise it with various solutions, but as long as you can’t eliminate all manual operations, it’s something you have to be aware of and work on preventively. Therefore, we must all feel a professional pride in doing the right thing, I would say that everyone in our team at the unit feels this way, which is incredibly fun to see.
01
So how do you get there, so that you actually feel pride in doing the right thing?
This is achieved through commitment, clarity and systematisation! explains Jarmo. We must have the conditions to do the right thing, that’s No 1.
There must be tools and people must be trained in how to use these tools and, just as importantly, they must understand why they should use them.
Information, training and follow-up… this is the basis for everything we are building.
We are clear that if you are unsure about something, you should stop and raise the alarm with me. It is better to stop unnecessarily than to release incorrect goods.
If we just stop it in-house, we have time to investigate and eliminate, without this having to disturb our customer. I am constantly in production with my team so we can watch, evaluate and discuss outcomes together.
Being close and showing with action that this is important is part of the whole of how we work. Words are just words, action is what matters.
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How do you work preventively on a purely practical level?
We systematically conduct risk assessments and item reviews.
After we installed our new powder box last summer, all articles are analysed to ensure the outcome. The first run is monitored and the articles receive a complete quality control where all remarks are logged and must be closed before the next run.
Only when all remarks are resolved and closed does the article get a green card and is placed in normal flow again.