NVIDIA has established a Quality Management System that provides a management framework spanning all activities - from product development to high volume manufacturing - through which NVIDIA achieves its goals of high product quality, highest customer satisfaction, and continuous improvement in all aspects of company business. At NVIDIA we believe that good quality also results in lower costs.
To ensure the best quality, reliability and interoperability of its products, NVIDIA maintains a most advanced and comprehensive testing environment, including in-house testing labs. This environment enables running real applications and verifying their "end-to-end" performance, and thus guarantees that NVIDIA delivers most reliable and compatible products.
NVIDIA employs a three-pronged approach in devising and administering continuous improvement activities:
- Leveraging on first-tier vendors’ systems
By using mature mainstream manufacturing processes, NVIDIA achieves lower defect densities and better process quality and reliability.
- Proactive internal quality control
NVIDIA tracks key performance and quality parameters to monitor and alert for deviations from healthy behavior. Moreover, all changes are closely monitored and approved through a special Change Control Board (CCB) to ensure no impact on quality.
NVIDIA also runs a well-defined Supplier Management process, which includes the identification and selection of suppliers with the capability to meet NVIDIA needs and requirements. The process also determines the criteria for selection, evaluation and qualification of suppliers.
- Reactive damage containment, recovery and root-cause identification
NVIDIA implements Customer Corrective Action Report (CCAR) procedures and conducts postmortem activities for completed projects and discovered issues.
NVIDIA incorporates principles of customer-perceived quality as part of NVIDIA's quality system by learning customer quality and reliability expectations. Moreover, upon customer line fallouts, data is collected and analyzed in order to implement/suggest corrective and preventive actions. Changes to our products are communicated to customers through Product Change Notifications (PCNs). Various reports of characterization, reliability tests, and qualification are available to our customers.
Customer satisfaction is measured throughout key performance parameters, interaction with customers, and annual customer surveys.