John Yuan is pBone Music’s Supply Chain and Quality Manager. He has extensive experience in the industry and uses this to support our instruments’ development and manage product manufacturing and delivery.
John also plays the crucial role of monitoring and assessing quality control throughout the entire manufacturing process. You could say he is the most important person in our business - if he says an instrument isn't high quality it won't leave the factory!
Here he shares what he and his team do and why it is important...
“The pBone Music team share a mission to offer the best plastic musical instruments to children all over the world to free their musical dream, and we take this very seriously! As part of this mission, with help from my team, my role is to devote myself to continuously improving our products’ quality.
Quality is of paramount importance to us, and is a core value in our business for a number of reasons:
- High-quality control gives our customers confidence – they know they can trust the workmanship, materials and function of our instruments
- High-quality control ensures we practice efficient manufacturing and reduces costs – by focusing on quality we limit wastage during production, and make sure products are delivered on time
- High-quality testing means we can demonstrate the safety and reliability of our instruments
We are dedicated to the ISO14000 (9000) system, which ensures we implement our quality control throughout the process. This includes planning and conducting quality control routines from the beginning of the manufacturing process, rather than simply quality checking at the end and implementing TQM (Total Quality Management) throughout our whole supplier chain.
So what does this actually mean? The following are just some examples:
- Every instrument model is compliant with environmental requirements according to CE certification standard
- Since November 2018 we have implemented a project with a high-level testing library in Dongguan to qualify each element involved in our products to comply with CP65 and EU REACH standards
- We record as much data for every single instrument throughout the production process as we can to be able to track and identify its quality history
Li Fei (pictured above with the whole team!) works in the quality control department of our supplier. Her role is to Support pBone Music and in particular John, with quality control.
Here she shares with us some of the methods the factory uses to ensure high quality during our instruments’ manufacturing process and why they are important…
“In 2008, our company passed both TS16949 and ISO9001 system certification. We have a high-precision air-gauge measuring system, which is used to measure the inner ‘bore’ dimensions of musical instruments – really important for the quality of sound.
We also have precision air-tightness measuring equipment to measure airtightness to 100%. We measure both the finished instruments, as well as instruments that have been semi-assembled to ensure they comply with the requirements throughout the manufacturing process.
In addition – we have set up a specially air-conditioned room to maintain the temperature within the 23°C - 27°C range. This is not for the comfort of the factory’s employees, but to limit key components’ size variation which can be caused by temperature change – again, this can affect the consistency and quality of the sound and functionality of the final products, so it is important to regulate this.
We practice our quality control methods throughout the whole production process of each instrument, recording all quality monitoring records for transparency. We are all dedicated to maintaining high quality so that customers receive the very best products we can produce.”
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