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:
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:
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.”