At the top of our sales funnel is good client retention. Everything else flows from there. Client retention enables us to maintain the revenue we need to finance our operations. These include research and development, customer service, employee compensation and benefit packages and our future overall. The best path to client retention is a quality product that works as advertised. With that consideration, the next logical step is to have an elite quality assurance or control system.

Our 40 point quality control was established when we transferred quality control responsibility from the engineering department to the customer support department. This seems backwards. Yet, it was the customer support department and not engineering that had the most familiarity with problems that made it out of our shop.

This is followed by a series of four internal tests at different phases of production. We have 2 preproduction tests, one in-production test and one post-production test. Followed by a final test once the order exits the production floor but before it hits the shipping department.

Most crucial series is the final 40 point final check once the order exits the production department. This comprehensive but simple test does everything from ensuring that they product label is correct to subjecting the GPS performance to the most extreme conditions possible. When we deployed the system in January 2011 we saw customer support levels drop through the floor. A clear sign that our system was delivering the results we desired. This process is virtually unchanged today from what it was in 2011 but has evolved to include additional extreme testing such as a thermal stress test in our environmental chamber.