QCA Certifies Bodek and Rhodes, Design Resources/Caps Direct

The Quality Certification Alliance (QCA), the promotional product industry's only independent, not-for-profit organization dedicated to helping companies provide safe products, has awarded QCA Accreditation to Philadelphia-based Bodek and Rhodes and Overland Park, Kansas-based Design Resources Inc./Caps Direct.

To achieve QCA Accreditation, companies must endorse a self-certification, complete a rigorous self-assessment, and then submit their headquarters and their supply base to multiple third-party audits. The QCA board uses a scorecard representing the performance of the applicant and its supply chain on the third-party audits as the foundation for granting accreditation.

"Going through the steps to achieve QCA Accreditation, we learned that we were already doing most of the right things, but it also made us aware of the bigger picture and the advantages of having a comprehensive compliance program," said Mike Rhodes, president/CEO of Bodek and Rhodes. "The QCA Certification Program helped us crystallize our processes, create our own vendor manual, communicate our requirements better and strengthen our inspection and quality review. We now have a Quality Assurance Team that has learned the requirements and is able to drill down the processes and guidelines to all employees and vendors."

Jason Krakow, vice president of Design Resources Inc./Caps Direct, said the company has also expanded staffing to address all the facets of compliance. "We enlarged our compliance committee and established a new position of compliance manager to lead the team and the process in an efficient and effective manner," he said. "Through the QCA Certification Program, we recognized increased opportunities to enhance our monitoring efforts, develop stronger product safety standards and improve our ability to organize all of our efforts into a streamlined, comprehensive compliance program."

The internal changes both companies made to integrate compliance into their daily operations demonstrates their ongoing commitment to delivering safe and compliant product to their distributor customers. And while this is important to distributors, it is equally—if not even more important—to end-buyers, who continue to demand the products they purchase are safe.