Prioritising quality is crucial to saving lives and protecting assets

Gisela Heyman is the Managing Director of Alaris Antennas and has been with the company for 6 years. During her first year as MD of Alaris Antennas, she also headed up the operations side of the business. She has been intimately involved in producing quality antenna systems used in communication, frequency spectrum monitoring, test and measurement, electronic warfare and other specialised markets.

The driving force behind her focus on quality lies in the Alaris Antennas business model which is centred around customers’ requirements and their needs.

We aim to be our customer’s trusted advisor by giving sound technological advice, being willing to customise existing products and/or innovatively design new products to meet their system requirements, thereby helping them to ‘gain the advantage’. Our products are built into larger systems that are designed to save lives and protect assets. Hence the quality and reliability of our products are crucial.

The art lies in delivering quality on time and still remaining competitive in a market where one of the deciding factors is the ability to develop new products in very short timeframes, within cost constraints and without compromising on quality.

We take a long-term view of how quality impacts the final use of our product.

The products designed and manufactured by the Alaris team are often designed into long life cycle systems that need to last for many years into the future. This requires solid design principles, manufacturing and diligent product testing to ensure a high-quality product that can withstand the harsh environments it is deployed in. Owing to the longer lifecycles of these products, it also means these opportunities only come around once every 2-5 years., Where quality is compromised, the offending products can cause serious reputational damage to both the customer and Alaris with lasting impacts on both parties. It is with this concept in mind that Alaris remains committed to having the quality of its products as a core operational focus.

Quality is more than just the finished product, it’s the processes, systems and people that are behind the product.

Quality is a mindset each and every employee needs to foster and drive throughout the business – from the way we answer our phones, and interact via email or in person internally and externally, to the quality of components our suppliers deliver to us, and all the way through the product design life cycle and the follow-up interaction with our customers after the delivery of products.

A common mantra at Alaris is “Quality cannot be inspected into products, and has to be driven throughout the entire process as it is the responsibility of every Alaris employee.”

With a strong focus on quality, Alaris Antennas has gained a good reputation with its client base of system integrators, frequency spectrum regulators and players in the homeland security space.