Purpose of role: To support our product development and ensuring our product complies with our quality standards and looks to exceed customer expectation. To work alongside our product operations teams, suppliers and key stakeholders to establish and maintain best practice.

Key Responsibilities:

Product and Process

• Understand and support delivery of the Primark Departmental and Quality strategy to deliver the customer promise.
• Demonstrates technical knowledge to support the delivery of quality products that are safe, legal and fit for purpose.
• Knowledge of home textiles manufacturing, design, compliance and legislation on existing product types and new innovations within the Home & Lifestyle category.
• Build and develop capability to assess commercial quality and testing requirements
• Assist with product development and adhere to “the Best Practice” sample process flow
• Investigate all Gold Seal rejections and communicate quality issues to product operations teams and suppliers
• Build competitor awareness to enable quality, fit and performance benchmarking of Primark versus key competitors
• Work with the Primark Compliance team to ensure the Primark Quality Standards are in line with industry standards (Value/Volume retail).
• Demonstrate an understanding of the legal/product/retail requirements for labelling
• Assist in identifying potential fit, fabric or component quality issues
• Manage reporting of testing submissions by supplier/product area/product type
• Compile and conclude tech packs and score card analysis as part of the delivery of the key line programme to ensure Primark quality standards and cost efficiencies are achieve
• Investigate and support resolution of quality issues in a timely manner with clear solutions and communication to all relevant stakeholders
• Monitors the Returns Report to identify high returning styles/products, highlighting risk to Product Technologists and develop CAP to enable improvements
• With guidance from the Product Technologist learn to identify risk suppliers/product for Pre-shipment and CFS inspection
• Evaluating risk and ability to make commercial recommendations on quality priorities in a volume environment.
• Investigate customer feedback/customer complaints/product issues and record on the quality incident log
• Monitors the Returns Report and Delivery Faults tracker to identify high returning/faulty delivered styles/products, working with the supply base to resolve and improve future deliveries

Suppliers

• Communicate with suppliers on the technical development of product.
• Highlight risk areas from testing submissions and with support of the Product Technologists work on an improvement plan
• Assist Suppliers on technical queries concerning product development
• Assist with regular updates to the supply base on Primark quality standards
• Gain a working understanding of the ethical team’s factory audit process and compliance to understand supplier performance.
• Support the supplier onboarding process by facilitating the Technical Audit process to assess a factory’s technical capability

Communication and Influence

• Communicates and interacts clearly and concisely to ensure that information is understood by product operations teams, retail and external contacts
• Demonstrates/develop effective communication skills tailored to the audience and objectives; provides feedback and responds to others in a professional, courteous and respectful manner.
• Supports the Product Technologist to deliver training and engagement with product operations teams and Suppliers to improve the sampling hit rate
• Identifies and gathers relevant information to solve problems and make informed decisions relating to quality standards.
• Makes decisions independently within parameters and understands when to seek guidance; collaborates with impacted stakeholders (Project teams, Suppliers and Peers).
• Attends B&M department meetings representing the Quality function

Working with others

• Works effectively with others to deliver common goals; readily offers support.
• Respects the ideas and contributions of others and readily takes opportunities to learn and seek out stretching opportunities to support own development
• Demonstrates self-awareness and understanding of own skills, abilities and development areas
• Prioritises and manages own activities in a structured, independent and timely way; keeps others informed and obtains additional information when required.
• Understands business need for flexibility and modifies behaviour accordingly; exhibits a positive, determined and results driven attitude.
• Contributes to and supports the delivery and content of the Primark Quality Academy training courses
• Supports training in best practice for sample approval to QA, product operations teams and suppliers
• Supports regular updates to the product operations teams and suppliers regarding new sections within the QA manual.
• Has the confidence to liaise with buyers, working independently and using logical thinking and cooperation to come to the right solution for the business

Candidate with required qualifications