Operational and commercial expertise recognised by the customers of Rhodia Polyamide Engineering Plastics, a European leader in this market

Rhodia Engineering Plastics regularly assesses its main customers’ satisfaction through annual surveys. In January 2004, Rhodia conducted an e-mail survey of a sample of contacts from the Purchasing, R&D, Technical Support, Quality and Supply Chain departments of its European customers.

Five main criteria were assessed:

- service and product quality

- commercial relationships

- innovation and technical support

- document management

- e-Business offer

The results were very positive, with 89% of respondents indicating they were satisfied with Rhodia’s performance in these fields.

“Despite a difficult economic context and highly competitive markets, the results of this survey show that the significant improvement in our operational performance is recognised and approved by our customers. This supports our industrial and commercial strategy, which focuses on innovation, customer satisfaction and operational excellence, thus enabling us to maintain our leading position among European producers of technical plastics” explains Dr Pierre Luzeau, Director of Rhodia Europe.

Attentive to its customers’ needs and encouraged by this positive opinion, Rhodia has decided to step up the change programmes already initiated in three fields:

- Improving the quality of our products and services:

Two years ago, Rhodia Polyamide Engineering Plastics introduced a Six Sigma approach, called “Star Variability”, which aims to substantially reduce the variability of its different processes. Drawing on the strong commitment of the entire company and its staff, who have been trained in the relevant methodologies, around sixty projects were successfully completed in 2003. Each of these projects dealt with customers’ specific concerns, which had been clearly identified in order to focus on the objective to be achieved and to increase the success factors.

- Innovation: To develop a wider range of new Polyamide products in close collaboration with our customers in the automotive, electrical and electronics sectors.

The latest innovations provide benefits in terms of:

. comfort, with new grades and comprehensive expertise in noise reduction,

. safety: Rhodia has developed high-performance metal/plastic designs for the fronts of vehicles in order to improve protection of pedestrians in the event of an accident,

. protection of the environment, with more effective fire-retardant products without bromide additives,

. reduction of fuel consumption, with new grades allowing lighter, easily recyclable bodywork.

- Simplified e-business solutions offering customers rapid and high quality access to transaction-related and technical information.

With a firm focus on new information technologies, the company is developing a diversified range of on-line services: a new website dedicated to technical plastics, the Sales & Services On Line e-commerce platform that enables customers to place and track their orders on-line in a fully secure environment on a 24/7 basis, and interconnection of our information systems (SAP) to those of our customers and suppliers through the Elemica hub.

In tomorrow’s world, our capacity and willingness to innovate and to create new usage concepts alongside our customers will ensure that our company grows while complying with the French chemical industry’s “Commitment to Progress” for the protection of the environment and adherence to the most demanding quality standards.

Reader enquiries

Rhodia Engineering Plastics
Avenue Ramboz
F-69192 Saint-Fons Cedex
France

+33 4 72 89 27 53

christine.bourguignon@​eu.rhodia.com

www.rhodia-ep.com