|
|
|
New Strategic Quality Team formed and Reliability Test Lab now in use ELKHART, Indiana, USA - December 2006 -- When it comes to audio equipment, the name Crown has always been synonymous with performance, reliability and quality. Today, as exciting new products continue to be developed, maintaining the high level of quality that customers have come to expect is a top priority for the company. With that in mind, Crown International established a Strategic Quality Team earlier this year and upgraded its factory to include a Reliability Test Lab equipped with some of the industry’s most sophisticated and rigorous testing equipment. While Crown has operated its own testing equipment for some time, the manufacturer’s testing criteria have become more stringent in recent years, often resulting in the need to send items to an outside laboratory for evaluation. Having its own comprehensive lab in-house not only accelerates testing during the early phases of product development, but also now allows the company to conduct quality audits on lines already in production. Heading up the Strategic Quality Team is Crown Senior Director of Engineering Bob Chadderdon, who comments, “This initiative has replaced older equipment and supplemented our existing tools with state-of-the-art, higher-performance equipment offering much better data collection capabilities. Simply put, this new lab lets us do more, faster. We have also integrated our own Harman HiQnet™ products into the lab as signal sources so we can monitor and control long-term operational testing remotely.” The equipment in the test lab does not simply run units through simulated environmental stress; it rakes them through some of the most extreme conditions imaginable. For example:
The machinery in the test lab provides the physical testing, but, for a more cognitive approach, the Strategic Quality Team was developed. “This is a cross-functional team dedicated to taking Crown’s quality to the next level: delivered quality, internal quality and, through development of best-practices, assuring that future products meet the highest expectations,” notes Chadderdon. Among the members of this powerhouse team are an electrical design engineer, a mechanical design engineer, an industrial engineer and a more traditional quality engineer. One goal of this group is to identify opportunities and lead improvement projects that often involve several different functional departments and help guide internal process optimization. About Crown International: About the Harman Pro Group: # # # Related image: Crown International’s new Reliability Test Lab featuring, among other things, a Thermotron thermal/humidity chamber (left) and shaker table and drop-test machine (center) Download High Resolution Image Reader contact: Editor contact: |
