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Quality Leadership

SENS Quality Policy

 

Quality is a culture vital to SENS, and to its customers on whose business SENS’ survival and success depend.

SENS products support essential infrastructure including power generation, oil & gas transmission, water treatment, health care, communications and the financial system.

In recognition of the importance of these applications, SENS quality policy is to make continuing improvement in quality and delivery performance toward a goal of zero defects, while remaining cost competitive. We aim to maximize customer satisfaction by targeting our improvement efforts on the largest sources of defects and waste.

Worst-case Design

 

MicroGenius_EMC3 (1)

Pictured: The MicroGenius 150 undergoing extensive RFI immunity and emissions testing.

Downtime is intolerable in mission-critical applications. To assure that our products work for many years even under extreme operating conditions SENS employs thorough “worst-case” design analysis and extensive testing.

Rule #1 in product reliability is to insure that all components remain within their stress limits, including under extreme operating conditions and worst-case tolerance stack up. SENS achieves this using worst case design practices that augment laboratory torture testing of design prototypes with extensive computer analysis to validate “corner cases” and other combinations of field conditions that cannot be tested in the lab.

The combination of thorough worst-case design and well documented, standardized production is the lowest cost way to create industrial products that survive harsh environments. SENS products offer outstanding dependability at affordable prices precisely because they are standardized and designed for worst-case conditions. In contrast, worst-case design is too time-consuming and costly to employ on custom-built products except for military application. Worst-case design practices are almost never employed on short-lived consumer grade products.

SENS customers benefit from richly featured products that suffer lower rates of field failure than more conventionally engineered competing products.

Codes & Standards

 

Third-party certification demonstrates that manufacturers and their products meet certain established standards for quality, safety, survivability, electromagnetic compatibility, and performance. Standards compliance does not guarantee success in any particular application, but manufacturers that obtain and maintain third-party certifications demonstrate the technical and financial commitment that reduces the risk for buyers.

ISO 9001 quality system: Demonstrating class-leading commitment to quality, SENS has maintained ISO 9001 certification since 1996. Outside auditors regularly verify that the company maintains internal controls over nearly every discipline, including regular self-audits and formal corrective and preventive action systems. In contrast, firms claiming “ISO-compliance” never are because they never face the pressure of third-party scrutiny.

SENS ISO 9001 Certificate

UL listing: Nearly all SENS products are listed to UL safety standards by UL (Underwriters Laboratories). UL writes the standards and typically takes a more stringent approach to enforcing them. Many engineers and AHJs (Authorities Having Jurisdiction) strongly prefer UL listing over others such as CSA or ETL even though any NRTL (Nationally Recognized Test Laboratory) is legal.

American Bureau of Shipping (ABS): SENS EnerGenius IQ and MicroGenius chargers are type approved by ABS and conform to US Coastguard requirements when fitted with an optional drip shield. Type approval means that SENS is authorized by ABS to ship immediately upon completion of factory tests without waiting for ABS auditor approval.


Electromagnetic compatibility: Tested in third-party labs, SENS chargers do more than meet legal limits for radio frequency emissions. Most models are certified to exceed stringent ANSI and European standards for immunity to electrical fast transients, electrostatic discharge, and lightning resistance.

Seismic survival: We expect that mission-critical infrastructure including electric power service, water utilities, and hospitals maintain operation during and after even severe earthquakes. The only mission-critical battery charger product lines certified to stringent IBC and OSHPD seismic standards are manufactured by SENS.

ISO 9001

 

ISO 9001 is an international quality management system standard based on well-accepted quality management principles including a strong customer focus, the motivation and implication of top management, the process approach, and continual improvement. Adopting ISO 9001:2015 helps ensure consistency and a disciplined process approach to improvement.

Two fundamental differences between ISO 9001 and non-ISO quality systems are formal audits and corrective action systems. Rigorous internal and third-party audits determine whether the company’s processes are in control and whether management regularly reviews results. The formal corrective action system enforces a disciplined approach to cross-functional root cause analysis of difficult problems.

SENS has maintained its ISO 9001 certification since becoming an early adopter of the system in 1996.

Lean Manufacturing

“Lean production” is the most efficient system yet devised to convert knowledge, materials and labor into finished goods. Compared with conventional “push” production systems, SENS Lean system delivers superior customer value in several ways:

Quality: “Lean” embeds more quality checks into the assembly operation than traditional batch-build systems. This reduces the chance of defects leaving the factory.

Delivery: Our high-performance supply chain and assembly processes enable SENS to achieve short lead times without stocking finished goods.

Cost: Better quality and faster throughput reduce our costs, enabling SENS to deliver higher specification, more reliable products at prices competitive with mid-market brands.

Continuous Improvement: The most powerful aspect of Lean production at SENS is Continuous Improvement. We take customer feedback seriously and devote generous management time and effort to improving both our products and service.

Lean production enables SENS to deliver greater than 98% of all orders on time, and at exceptional levels of quality.