Known for its revolutionary mattress, Purple is a leader in comfort innovation. With a focus on helping people feel and live better, the company has been continuously reinventing comfort for more than 20 years
In the hyper-competitive mattress marketplace, quality and innovation are paramount to success. Purple uses Reliance to maintain quality throughout its organization — including its supply chain — to continue to focus on innovation and investment in proprietary, patented comfort technologies and manufacturing processes.
Meeting the need
Purple began its quality journey by implementing Reliance’s Document Control application, which provided the company with collaborative, cloud-based document control with a defined workflow for procedures and processes. This implementation allows employees to create, distribute, and archive all controlled documents from a single location. “Purple needed a place to store technical documents. They were being created and put into people’s personal desktops and SharePoint folders and needed a solution allowing everyone on the team to easily access everything. Everyone receives access to Reliance on the first day they’re hired,” Anna Cook, Quality Systems Manager, Purple, explained.
After successfully deploying document controls across the organization, Purple continued its quality journey by rolling out other Reliance applications in a phased approach, allowing users across various business units to see Reliance’s benefits and drive greater adoption. Specifically, Reliance’s corrective and preventive action (CAPA) application drives continuous improvement by allowing users to collaborate on systemic or recurring issues and develop appropriate corrective action plans, which plays a crucial role in regulatory compliance.
Filling the gap
Before Reliance, Purple used an entirely manual process for “tracking” nonconformances, noting products out of compliance on a Word document form that was then routed to employees for sign-off. Since implementing Reliance’s nonconformance application, the company has seen continuous improvement, boosting product quality by minimizing the introduction of defects. Not only has Purple realized substantial time savings, but Reliance’s dashboard allows everyone — including leaders in the C-suite — an at-a-glance view of product quality. Reliance helped Purple weather the changes brought about by the pandemic, allowing the company to start reaping value right out of the box, then facilitating easy customization of specific applications based on user feedback. Reliance’s integrated quality system allows users to work remotely, letting users log in from any location and handle their tasks, including approvals. Purple provides supplier’s controlled access to Reliance; relieving the purchasing department of the burden of emailing suppliers each change in the product specs. Purple can make updates in Reliance once, and all suppliers have immediate access to the updated information directly from Reliance. “I think the biggest benefit of supplier access is that we don’t have to rely on purchasing to always give the supplier the latest version of an updated product specification. Instead, they can go directly to Reliance to receive that information,” Cook explained when outlining how providing supplier access to Reliance has been beneficial.
Looking forward
Purple has recently implemented Reliance’s Training Management application across several business units, ensuring staff stays up-to-date on work instructions and updates without putting undue training burdens on supervisory staff. “We’ve implemented training in departments where document control is used the most and, so far, it’s been very well received,” Cook noted about the ease of implementation and updating training modules. Additionally, Purple recently implemented Reliance’s Planned Deviation application, and feedback has been positive. Suppliers can now proactively let Purple know if a product doesn’t meet Purple’s specs and receive engineering approval before shipping the product, saving time and money. Purple also plans to implement Reliance’s Change Management application soon. As Purple expands their use of Reliance applications, they have also progressed from a straight out of the box implementation to making more configurations to meet their evolving business needs.
About Purple
Purple is a digitally-native vertical brand with a mission to help people feel and live better through innovative comfort solutions. We design and manufacture various innovative, premium, branded comfort products, including mattresses, pillows, cushions, frames, sheets, and more. Our products result from over 25 years of innovation and investment in proprietary and patented comfort technologies and the development of our manufacturing processes. Our proprietary Hyper-Elastic Polymer® gel technology underpins many of our comfort products and provides benefits that differentiate our offerings from other competitors’ products. We market and sell our products through our direct-to-consumer online channels, traditional retail partners, third-party online retailers, and our owned retail showrooms. For more information on Purple, visit purple.com.
“Purple needed a place to store technical documents. They were being created and put into people’s personal desktops and SharePoint folders and needed a solution allowing everyone on the team to easily access everything. Everyone receives access to Reliance on the first day they’re hired.”
Anna Cook Quality Systems Manager, Purple
