At the top of our sales funnel is successful client retention. Everything flows from there. Client retention ensures we maintain the revenue we need to support our operations. These include research and development, customer support, employee compensation and benefit plans and our overall future. The best path to client retention is providing a quality product that meets expectations. With the in mind, the logical step is to have a stellar quality assurance or control system.

Our 40 point quality control system was developed  when we transferred quality control responsibility from the engineering department to the customer support department. This may sound counter-intuitive. But in fact, it was the customer support department and not engineering who had the most experience with problems that found their way out of our shop.

The system is preceded by a series of four internal tests at different phases of production. We do 2 preproduction tests, an in-production test and a post-production test. Then a final test after the order leaves the production floor and before it gets to the shipping department.

The most critical series is the final 40 point final check after the order leaves the production department. This long but simple test covers everything from confirming that they product label is correct to testing the GPS performance under the most difficult conditions possible. When we started the system back in January 2011 we saw customer support levels drop dramatically. A clear sign that our system was having the desired results. This system is basically the same today as it was on 2011 although it has evolved to include more dramatic testing including a thermal stress test in our environmental chamber.