Inside the warehouse
The story so far
In the second feature in this series we gave you the lowdown on QVC’s primary quality control procedures – the unspeakably rough treatment and careful examinations that are carried out for each and every product that is supplied to you by QVC.
Now here’s part three in the sequence that takes the product from being sourced by the buying team to arriving at your door. It’ll deal with the product’s arrival in our cavernous warehouse in Knowsley, Liverpool and what happens to it there.
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A product doesn’t get as far as the warehouse, as we mentioned earlier, unless it passes our quality assurance tests and it can be supplied in acceptable mail-order packaging. All this is arranged between the buyer and the supplier, so that when a lorryload of a particular product arrives at our warehouse in Knowsley to be unloaded and stored, it all should be in mint, saleable condition.
To say that QVC’s Knowsley warehouse is an efficient outfit would be something of an understatement. Suppliers who have had their product accepted by the buyers can’t just send a lorry round to the warehouse when they want. Time is tight – slots for delivery are just 15 minutes long, so it all has to be booked in with military precision.
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In rolls the lorry, up to one of the bays as arranged. Up go the doors and in go the unloaders on forklift trucks, and in a few moments the stock is inside the warehouse, ready to be stored.
Once the contents of a lorry have been unloaded, they don’t just sit there waiting to be bought and shipped out – at least not all of them. We pointed out earlier that the products should be in perfect order when they arrive. But we don’t take it for granted. So we run a quality control. Again.
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As Stuart Shrimpton, Quality Assurance Manager at the Knowsley warehouse explains: ‘We use a tried and tested statistical sampling method that has been around for years. For example, if there are between 1,200 and 3,200 items of a particular product, which is the most common range, the number of samples taken for testing is 80. From that sample, no more than three failures are tolerated. Seven failures out of 80 mean the whole batch will be rejected, but if there are between three and seven failures, we take 80 more and start again!’
The testing done here at the warehouse is exactly what is carried out at an earlier stage in London. It’s just as stringent and exacting and conforms to British Standards. Quality control has three levels of failure: minor, major and critical. Critical failure means ‘zero tolerance’.
Critical failure is rare, but when it happens, as Stuart Shrimpton explains, it spells doom for the product. The whole batch will be rejected. No second tests. An example of critical failure would be faulty wiring, or, one example mentioned by Stuart, an instructional video for a piece of exercise equipment that had somehow been recorded onto previously used commercial video tapes.
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For jewellery, the process is the same, but all the testing and handling takes place in a sealed vault. This may sound like overkill, but it reflects the care and attention we devote to the process as a whole.
When a batch of products has been accepted, it will be stored in the warehouse, waiting for the time when orders start to come in. In the meantime, two samples are sent to our base in London to go to Show Control, where they will be used as demonstration models on air, making their TV debut; the QVCUK.com copywriters will be able to look at these products, too, before writing the copy that goes onto the Web site with the image of the product.
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And that just about covers this part of the story. In our next feature, we’ll reveal the secrets of planning the shows on QVC to showcase certain products, and how the products are presented and demonstrated on air. |