5 Reasons Every Brand Needs A Quality Standards Manual

Maximize your customer impact. Build the most productive relationships with vendors and manufacturers. Avoid costly mistakes and errors. Create a Brand Quality Standards Manual. Identify all the details that make your products unique and valuable. This is the starting point to build superior consistency and quality into all of your products.

What is a Brand Quality Standards Manual?

Your Quality Standards Manual is your brand's rule book to create the best versions of your products. Define clear pass/fail criteria for product appearance and function. Show detailed examples and diagrams to meet your requirements. Reference industry standards. Include best practices unique to your products. Identify repeatable processes to gauge quality at all stages of development and production. Using a Brand Quality Standards Manual is the best way to maximize success and minimize risks and oversights.

Why Do You Need a Quality Standards Manual?

1. Maintains Quality Consistency:

High-quality brands deliver beautiful, exciting and reliable products. Your Quality Standards Manual details how to achieve the optimal versions of everything you make. Your vendors and suppliers must understand your requirements for success. Your customers demand and appreciate consistency. Every exceptional customer experience grows loyalty, referrals and repeat business.

2. Defines Brand Rules of Quality:

Your Quality Standards Manual details how to properly design, engineer and manufacture your products. Document and share vital internal knowledge. Build a solid foundation for new development and innovation while eliminating repeats of past problems. Support new collaboration and optimization while protecting your core values.

3. Provides Powerful Tools for Quality Management:

A Quality Standards Manual provides tools to keep your design and manufacturing processes consistent. A single reference for quality requirements anchors design and sample evaluation. Your quality manual simplifies new vendor and component sourcing selections.

With clear quality standards, your brand can better manage issues and problems. Extract valuable feedback data from customer interactions. Categorize complaints and accurately gauge severity based on your quality standards. Assess risk and costs to prioritize focus for each problem area. Set achievable KPIs to resolve warranty issues and customer complaints.

4. Shares A Clear Understanding of Your Values

Quality requirements aren’t just for designers and engineers. Everyone within your organization can learn your brands' quality standards. Too often, critical preventative actions are missed because quality requirements are unclear and subjective. Equip staff and vendors to be proactive in rejecting defective components, improving process SOPs or preventing customer issues. Your Quality Manual can become a key training tool for your brand. Protect your customers, products and brand reputation.

5. Builds Brand Value

When your quality standards are clear, all stakeholders participate to protect your brand. Initiate designers and product managers to brand standards and include them in all vendor communication. Engineers should use brand standards in design updates & revisions. Sales and Service teams can deliver superior "factory" results during customer interactions. Appropriate care can be taken to properly adjust new products for influencers and reviewers.

Increase the value of each production by initiating vendors and OEMs into your brand quality standards. You can leverage vendor expertise to achieve your quality goals. Great vendors will work proactively to achieve your standards without constant reminders. Move away from expensive re-work and recalls to strategizing with vendors to prevent problems. This creates incentives for both parties to work together for real cost and efficiency savings.

Getting Started:

Gather the most experienced and knowledgeable staff in your organization. Identify past quality issues and lessons learned. Pin these for focus in your manual. Prevent painful repeats of old problems.

Review all regional compliance requirements. Integrate key items into your manual. It is business critical that designers, engineers, managers and vendors keep products updated to meet regional and global compliance standards.

Define non-negotiable brand requirements. Likewise, determine some spaces for acceptable variation in manufacturing. These can be target areas for cost reductions.

Start with the most visible surface touch-points of your products: elements that your customers interact with everyday. Set the position and angle of handlebars and seats. Include safety & function details of steering, pedaling, braking and shifting components. Define your UI/UX visibility and functionality. Create detailed requirements for the visual appearance of your products.

Define acceptable limits for frame, fork and component variation & defects. Finally, cover the deeper technical details that are hidden from customer view but impact the performance and longevity of your products.

Taking Control of Quality:

After your Quality Manual is complete, it is time to update your vendors and OEMs. Introduce your updated standards and lead the discussion on how to systematize quality in manufacturing and assembly. Expect feedback and suggestions from vendors. Set appropriate timelines and milestones for improvements. Request new samples that demonstrate all enhanced quality requirements. Schedule audits to validate factory updates to ensure all material and process improvements have been achieved.

Your brand may be established and have quality management systems in place. However, without a brand quality manual, you are navigating design & manufacturing without a map or GPS. Don't waste time and money by only relying on case-by-case quality decisions. You need clear brand standards to maximize quality and value. If your brand is ready to build your Quality Standards Manual, we’d love to help.

True.Quality Engineering can work with your team to start the process. We can also deliver a complete package of finished documents and tools tailored to your needs. True.Quality Engineering will on-board your vendors with new brand requirements. We perform factory audits to ensure vendor & OEM quality management systems are working at peak efficiency to protect your brand. Contact us for a free consultation to discuss your needs.

Subscribe to True Quality Engineering for more insights into Quality Management and the Cycling/EV industry. Please share your experiences in the comments. Reach us directly to discuss your specific needs. Info@truequalityengineering.com