Environmental Testing & A Foundation of Quality

A foundation of quality. That is the cornerstone which supports all aspects of Alpha Analytical, one of the largest environmental testing labs in the United States. We are fortunate to have worked with Alpha Analytical for over a decade.

Jim Todaro is the Quality Assurance Officer of Alpha Analytical. Alpha Analytical is now one of the largest environmental testing labs in the United States. As the organization has grown, so has their quality assurance department and, with it, their efforts. Jim shared:

Alpha has built its reputation from the very beginning on Quality. We keep that up front. When I first got involved in the QA department here there were only two of us. Now there are 8. We have made a real effort, and we have been successful as we’ve grown.

Nearly all of their quality assurance team has lab and analytics experience. Jim sees this as a strength of their quality program. “The group is made up of people with good backgrounds and experiences. It is multi-faceted.”

One of the team members Jim regularly works with is Rene Bennett, the Quality Assurance Specialist at Alpha Analytical. She has been with Alpha Analytical for 13 years, originally working in the organic extractions lab. She’s been working in Quality Assurance for the last 10 years.

Jim and Rene share a deep passion for their work, a strong belief in Alpha Analytical, and are both driven by continuous improvement. Quality Assurance for Rene meant a more widespread impact. “The idea of working across the entire company was really exciting,” she explained.

So where does Qualtrax come in? Our path intersected with theirs at an industry trade show nearly a decade ago, and those qualities are what drew us together. Jim was chatting with vendors at the trade show with a very specific goal in mind: an internal audit solution that could be utilized from an ipad. Jim was pleasantly surprised to learn of the power of Qualtrax. He recalled:

One thing we are known for is being a lean organization. So we were looking for ways to get rid of any manual aspect of [Quality Assurance]. At that point, it was starting to get overbearing, just the paper we were having to keep for quality assurance documentation. It was becoming a real problem. When we were talking to Qualtrax we thought it was really awesome. We like to be the front runner, so we thought wow– this would really help us be the front runner.

As excited as Jim was to purchase our product, he never anticipated the profound impact it could have across Alpha Analytical. During implementation training, they were struck by the power of process automation and workflows. He shared, “We started out by putting all our people and documents in Qualtrax, then we looked to the next step. We started with a nonconformance workflow and now we have about a dozen.”

The use of workflows became contagious. “Anything you put in it you can query on it. I probably run a dozen different reports each week,” said Rene. “It is nice that anything you can type in you can go out and find if you need to.”

We love knowing that, by using our product, Alpha Analytical can meet– and exceed– the demands of compliance. “We are doing analytical work and providing results,” Jim said. “It is extremely important when we have…professionals…making decisions on what to do in a particular situation that it is based on accurate and quality results.”  Alpha Analytical’s work has an incredible impact on its industry, which means maintaining compliance standards and keeping with industry standards for quality assurance is absolutely necessary. Through Qualtrax, Alpha Analytical can keep working hard to help our community and world at large.

Categories: Environmental, Quality Managers, Testing Labs

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