Company overview
Founded in 1996, Twin Star Home is an omnichannel market leader in award-winning indoor and outdoor home furnishings with more than 200,000 five-star consumer reviews.
The company holds hundreds of design and technology patents and makes extensive use of data, including a proprietary intelligence platform, to combine the latest trends with consumer-driven innovation.
Twin Star Home's business model includes partneringwith borderless e-commerce leaders and traditional brick-and-mortar retailers.
In a wide-spanning network of collaborators and clients, standarzised, digitized quality assurance is a cornerstone for optimizing supply chains and the customer journey.
Streamlining Quality Control to Support Growth
Rapid growth comes with its own challenges.For Twin Star, continued global expansion meant a need to optimize the quality assurance process. Furthermore, the company wished to increase quality assurance data utilization in its data-centric approach.
Furniture businesses often have extensive networks of collaborators. Twin Staris no exception. Charting a clear coursefor increasing supply chain resilience and maintaining the highest possible production quality requires insight regarding existing quality issues, developing trends and optimizing every step of the product journey.
In the existing setup, every quality controller was spending hours creating paper reports each a day. As a result, lesstime was spent on quality control, data was difficult to operationalize, and generatingreal-time insights a massive challenge.
“It’s critical for our success to stay closely connected to what happens on the factory floor. We knew we needed a robust, intuitive solution that would streamline our process and facilitate collaboration. Since discovering Qarma, we have fixed our pain points”
- Loic Bonnenfant, Global Quality Director at Twin Star Home
Getting to the Source
When expanding its quality initiatives, Twin Star was focused on increasing data capabilities, standardizing reporting and formats, and integrating a simple, intuitive solution that would complement its existing technological setup.
With around sixty collaborators, differing formats and reports can create bottlenecks and mismatched expectations. During disruptive, changeable times, relying solely on quality controllers is lessthan optimal.
Qarma’s intuitive setup and ability to run on existing hardwarelike smartphones was a huge draw for Twin Star. It enables factory floor workers and managers to play a more prominent role in following and documenting quality, plus quickly identify and learn from mistakes. As a result, Twin Star has increased its ability to optimise quality throughout its extensive network
Twin Star carries out detailed quality control, including for key KPIs such as:
- First Pass Yield (FPY)
- Defect (minor/major/critical)
- Quantity of Inspections
- Number of Quality Inspectors Needed
For the company’s quality controllers, the shift to a digital solution with inbuilt reporting means that large amounts of data can easily be logged and reported on, and more on-site time is spent on helping improve quality.
“Paper reports cannot be fully up to date, and we risk losing valuable data and time. Now we have real-time insights and identification of quality issues”
Results
Twin Star’s move to digital and data-focused quality control has resulted in significant savings across several areas. For one, the ability to do standardized, digital on-site reporting minimizes report writing times for quality controllers.
Loic Bonnenfant estimates that each quality controller spent at least 1.5 hours per report, even without counting commutingtime. Today, that time is much lower, and reports are filed in real-time.
As a result, Twin Star staff across continents can follow and optimize quality throughout a product’s lifecycle. The results are especially impressive for teams responsible for logistics and supply chain.
“I have received emails from our teams in the USA saying Qarma has been a major game-changer”
The increased visibility mitigates risks like quality check issues and potential delivery delays. Furthermore, it provides the company with data that is used daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly to evaluate performance or the impacts of new initiatives and strategies.
For example, Twin Star has developed a PowerBI supplier scorecard used directly with its 35 largest collaborators to continuously improve production processes. This is based on the data gathered through Qarma.