Volvo is world wide known for its reputation of safety cars. VOLVO has won various world know international rewards for its high levels of quality and safety.

Volvo Cars Ghent is part of the Volvo Group, now integrated in the Premier Automotive Group (PAG) of Ford. After competing with other plants in the Ford group, the plant was awarded assembly of the successors of the smaller S40/V40 compact cars, in addition to the exclusive manufacturing of the medium-sized Volvo S60 and the bigger V70.

Volvo Ghent is world-renowned for excellent manufacturing quality. The factory plant counts for more than 4.000 employees and is even today constantly growing. The plant has received numerous awards including the Japanese Total Productive Maintenance Award, the European Quality Award for Operational Units and the J.D. Powers ‘Best Plant in Europe’ award. Volvo achieves this excellent quality level thanks to the dedicated workforce, training initiatives and the unique method of organizing teams at the flexible assembly line. Each team is assigned a variety of tasks and every team member is responsible for suggesting ways to increase quality and productivity.

In its process of continuous quality, health and environment improvement, VOLVO decided in 2001 to look for an IT solution on the marketplace which would help them to better structure the internal know how of their internal procedures and to make this information up-to-date and shareable to everyone within the plant. After a tough selection process, the quality management team decided to go for WEBISO, mainly because of its internet/intranet support and its well thought model of approval and publishing cycles, distribution points, version control and distribution points. The main goal of the implementation of WEBISO was on one hand to centralize the procedural information and on the other hand to decentralize the production of this information. Besides they wanted to get rid of the paper work in the various types of communication of procedures throughout the organization so that the automated process of creation, approval, and distribution would stimulate co-workers to suggest more and better production procedures for car making. VOLVO stated from the beginning that WEBISO would be the key communication platform to share information and thus key to a better production of car making.

Today WEBISO is being used by more than 800 trained editors and approvers and is being consulted by more than 4.000 people. The system is being used by white and blue collar workers and is fully implemented from direction level up to the shop floor. It manages all VOLVO's procedures of Quality, Health, Safety and Environment.

2001