Quality is not a week, it's how we work
World Quality Week is a chance for everyone at Zikodrive to stop and reflect on something we live with every day. For us, quality is not a department, a certificate on the wall or a box ticked at the end of the production line. It is the sum of hundreds of small decisions made by every person in the business, every single day.
Our core values of humility, ownership and mastery sit at the heart of that. Humility means being honest when something isn't right and wanting to learn from it. Ownership means every one of us takes responsibility for the quality of our own work, rather than assuming someone further down the line will catch a problem. Mastery means continually raising the bar on what good looks like. Quality Week is our opportunity to celebrate how far we've come, and to be clear about where we're going next.
Embedding quality at every stage
A motor controller is only as reliable as the weakest link in the process that made it. That's why we treat quality as something designed in from the very first conversation with a customer, not inspected in at the end.
It starts with understanding requirements properly, so that what we quote is what the customer actually needs. It continues through design, where reviews, design-for-manufacture checks and a structured verification and validation approach make sure our hardware and firmware are robust before a single board is built. In purchasing, we qualify our suppliers, monitor component risk and protect our customers from the knock-on effects of shortages and obsolescence.
On the production floor, controlled processes, ESD-safe working, traceability and formal test procedures ensure every unit leaves us performing as intended. And it doesn't stop at dispatch. When something does go wrong, our structured approach to defect and root cause categorisation means we don't just fix the symptom, we fix the cause, and feed that learning back into design and process. Our ERP system ties all of this together, giving us a single source of truth from order to delivery.
Our commitment to recognised standards
We have held ISO 9001 certification for five years, and it remains the backbone of how we run the business. But for us, ISO 9001 is not about passing an audit once a year. It's a framework for continual improvement: clear processes, measurable objectives, honest internal review and a genuine focus on customer satisfaction. Every year we push ourselves further, whether that's tightening calibration and measurement control, strengthening our verification activities or improving how we capture and act on nonconformances.
Alongside ISO 9001, we build to IPC-A-610, the internationally recognised standard for the acceptability of electronic assemblies. It gives our team and our customers a shared, objective definition of what a good solder joint, a correctly placed component and a clean assembly look like. Our people are trained to it, and it informs both our inspection criteria and our conversations with customers about acceptance.
We also work to IEC 61340-5-1 for electrostatic discharge control, protecting sensitive components from damage that might not show up until a product is in the field. These standards sit within a wider set of commitments, including our membership of Make UK and our accreditation as a Real Living Wage employer, because we believe a quality business is built by people who are valued, trained and invested in.
AI at the heart of our quality control
The next step in our quality journey is putting AI-driven processes at the centre of how we detect and prevent problems. The principle is simple: the earlier an issue is found, the cheaper and less disruptive it is to fix. A defect caught at design review costs a fraction of one caught at final test, and a tiny fraction of one found in a customer's product in the field.
Every board we build and every unit we test generates data: inspection results, test measurements, process parameters and defect records. Traditionally, much of that data is reviewed only when something has already gone wrong. By applying AI to it, we can spot subtle trends and patterns that a person scanning a spreadsheet might miss, such as a test parameter slowly drifting towards its limit, a recurring defect type linked to a particular component batch, or a process step that is becoming less stable over time.
This lets us move from reacting to problems to anticipating them. Our engineers and operators remain firmly in control: AI flags, prioritises and surfaces insight, and our people apply their judgement and expertise to act on it. It's a tool that makes skilled people more effective, not a replacement for them.
What this means for our customers
For the OEMs who rely on our brushless DC, stepper and asynchronous motor controllers, the benefits are tangible. Early detection means fewer defects reaching their production lines, fewer field failures and less time spent on returns and investigations. It means more consistent product, batch after batch, which matters enormously as our customers scale their own volumes.
It also means real cost savings. Every issue caught early avoids the cost of rework, scrap, delayed shipments and, in the worst cases, warranty claims and damage to our customers' reputations with their own end users. Better data also gives us better conversations: we can share evidence of process capability, respond faster and more precisely when a concern is raised, and work with customers on improvements backed by facts rather than assumptions.
Quality as a shared responsibility
The Calder Valley has a proud manufacturing heritage, built on a reputation for making things properly. We want Zikodrive to be part of bringing that back: high-quality products, made in West Yorkshire, by skilled people in good jobs. Quality is what earns that reputation, and it is everyone's job, from the newest apprentice to the boardroom.
So this Quality Week, we're asking every member of the team to take a moment to think about their own part in it. What's one thing in your area that could be done better, more consistently or more safely? Raise it, own it and help us fix it. That's what quality means to us, this week and every week.