What’s New

Every year, we celebrate our dedication to Quality in the month of November. This year our theme is Stand Up Together! The Senior Leadership team at HARMAN were asked to comment on why Quality is so important for our company’s reputation and the overall customer experience when consumers purchase one of our products.

HARMAN is a matrix organization. For those of you not familiar with matrixed organizations, do not feel bad, neither was I before I joined the company. A matrix organization is a work structure where team members report to multiple leaders. In a matrix organization, team members (whether remote or in-house) are often managed through a project manager as well as their department head. In other words, we all need to understand our roles and the roles of the stakeholders that we interact with daily.

Approaching quality from a team perspective improves the likeliness of achieving excellence. Our relentless approach to quality starts with the industrial design and layout of the components. It is important that our engineers, product testers, and suppliers understand how the products use-case. We supply all parties with a Product Requirements Document (PRD) to make sure everyone is aligned. On products that have a software component to them, we also provide all parties with a Software Requirements Document (SRD). These documents are created by the Product Development team but are approved by key stakeholders prior to kicking off any new project. Below are some of the benefits of creating, vetting, and maintaining the expectations of requirements documentation.

Also in this month’s newsletter, you will learn from Dale Seidlitz, our Global Quality Manager for Luxury Audio, about a new Acceptable Quality Limit (AQL) initiative occurring at many of our regional warehouses. As the theme of our Quality Month states, we all must Stand up for Quality.