Setting a Standard For Quality
- by Bryan Veldboom - updated on 4/1/2019
As a customer, you’ve come to rely on Batteries Plus Bulbs for the highest quality battery and lighting products. What you might not be aware of is how much time and effort we put into maintaining the safety and quality standards of the products we sell. Heading up this important work is the company’s Quality Assurance team, who work behind the scenes to ensure that the products you receive are both safe and reliable.
According to Jason Fladhammer, Director of Quality Assurance, the purpose of his team is “to continuously monitor and improve the quality and safety of our products in the field.” This is accomplished in a number of ways.
The Testing Facility
For starters, the QA team carefully vets all potential product suppliers. Members of the team will create a Quality Acceptance Plan (QAP) for each individual product and use this as a quality standard against which all future shipments of that item will be judged. Jason explained that before shipments will be accepted the “products must meet [these] quality acceptance standards.”
In addition to this, the QA team performs its own in-house quality testing. Working from our facilities in Hartland, Wisconsin, the team puts batteries and light bulbs through rigid industry standard tests designed to gauge each product’s standards of performance, safety and reliability.
The team tests every aspect of a battery’s performance, including important safety checks like gauging a battery’s response to extreme temperatures or overcharging. Likewise, photometric tests are performed on light bulbs, verifying everything from its current to voltage, color temperature and more.
This important work is echoed by the QA team working out of our Distribution Center. This team performs an important final quality check, inspecting and testing batteries on their last step before being shipped out to stores.
In-Store Support
Customer Concern Reports offer another important means of maintaining quality. These reports enable both in-store Trusted Advisors and warehouse employees to contact the QA team directly regarding any merchandise concerns.
Jason explained that “each report is then investigated by the QA team and remains open until corrective actions are both implemented and verified, when applicable.” These reports offer an important quality check within our stores, enabling associates to relay potential customer complaints to the QA team for investigation.
Shenzhen Facilities
In addition to our facilities in Hartland, Wisconsin, we maintain a second QA team, headquartered in Shenzhen, China. This team performs a number of additional quality assurance checks.
Among these duties is the use of vendor factory audits. These audits allow members of the China QA team to perform an extensive evaluation of a supplier’s qualifications, investigating everything from their quality systems to their manufacturing capabilities, social accountability standards and more. This ensures that the suppliers we purchase from are both trustworthy and reliable.
The team also performs important checks on all product shipments prior to delivery, making sure that the Quality Acceptance Plans for each product have been met before allowing them to be shipped overseas.
As you can see, Batteries Plus Bulbs puts enormous effort into our quality assurance standards, meaning you can buy with confidence, knowing that you’ll be getting only the best batteries and bulbs.