Job Summary

The Product Quality Specialist is responsible for leading product quality standards compliance in collaboration with vendors, internal team members and customers.  This position will be tracking, charting and analyzing customer quality complaints and internal inspection results. Through analysis, this role will manage product change projects.  This position is the conduit from product issue discovery to our Sales and Customer Experience Teams, Supply Chain, compliance, appropriate vendors and customers. The Product Quality Specialist’s analysis and actions will ensure customer standards are met. This role will lead root cause analysis & corrective action projects with vendors. This position will participate in improvement projects in Supply Chain. This position may be required to travel domestically and internationally. This position reports to the Supply Chain Director.

Key Accountabilities

Product Quality Assurance

• Create quality expectation vision, document and on-board vendors.
• Lead quality assurance by reviewing quality complaints regularly, identifying root cause and solutions in collaboration with vendors and internal team.
• Ensure proper documentation by keeping track of final samples approved for production and following up with review of quality consistency.
• Document quality assurance process.
  • Log complaints, manage & distribute product quality information.
  • Analyze product quality, create reports, and present findings to management team.
  • Communicate issues with internal and external customers.
  • Work with vendors to identify root cause and resolve.
• First article inspection reports.
  • Work with Product Development Team to document findings of FAIR.
  • Follow up with vendors and implement necessary actions required.
• Final production standards and product variation limits.
  • Work with vendors to maintain accuracy of FPS inventory.
  • Work with vendors to maintain product color variation limits.

Compliance

• Packaging compliance.
  • Participate in green packaging initiative to reduce landfill waste.
  • Packaging reduction, reduce unnecessary bulk and cost.
• Engineering change requests.
  • Work in tandem with our Operations Manager to log all product engineering changes.

Projects as Assigned

• Provide help with sourcing.
• Assist product development team.
• Backup Supply Chain department as needed.
• Travel as needed.
• Identify areas of cost savings; product, packaging, etc. and take action to realize savings.
• Other duties as assigned by supervisor.

Required Education and Experience

• Post-secondary degree preferred.
• Three to five years of professional experience with emphasis on product quality assurance.
• Experience with continuous improvement culture.
• Demonstrated experience interacting with external and internal customers to gather information and coordinate projects to satisfy the client’s needs.

Competencies

• Microsoft office experience (Outlook, SharePoint, PowerPoint, Word, Excel).
• Proficiency in Excel.
• Understand and have the ability to analyze data.
• Strong math, verbal, written and customer service skills with ability to organize, prioritize and execute against established KPIs.
• Excellent issue identification and problem-solving skills.
• Ability to analyze problems and actively seek resolutions, both independently and within a team framework.
• Keyboarding accuracy and speed.
• Customer Service focused with demonstrated ability to WOW customers.
• Demonstrated ambition, adaptability, and accountability.
• Ability to effectively organize workload and meet deadlines.
• Demonstrated knowledge of global freight forwarding or import and/or related industry such as distribution, supply chain logistics.
• Ability to multitask and work independently.
• Familiarity with ERP systems, Microsoft Dynamics Navision.
• Experience working with overseas manufacturing preferred.
• Previous international vendor travel is preferred.
• APICS, Lean or Six Sigma preferred.

Expectations

• Monday through Friday, 8:00am – 4:30pm CST
• Remote role – requires working on-site only as requested by management.