RV News On Line - The Voice of the RV Industry


June 2004		Volume 29 - Number 11

RV News Feature Page 2

How does a company build such quality and consistency into their products? It’s in the corporate culture and it relies on a traditional New England work ethic that assures satisfaction at all levels of the customer experience. Harting notes, “We provide full ISO 9001 quality from cradle to grave. From design to final testing, we check everything from incoming parts through production, online quality controls, in-circuit testing and functional testing. All of our gas ignition controls are also tested and certified by third party agencies such as UL, CSA, FM and CE. Our reliability is so high in manufacturing that our failure rate for field returns is less than one-tenth of 1%.”

The company started in a small shop in Danvers, MA in 1938 and was named for the two founders of the company, T. L. Fenn and Dr. Carl Walter.

Together they established a new manufacturing company and named it FENWAL by combining the first three letters of both of their last names. Fenwal pioneered automatic (pilotless) gas ignition in the early 1960’s with spark ignition controls and direct flame sense. The company was acquired by Walter Kidde & Co. Inc. in 1966 and later was consolidated with several other subsidiaries to become Kidde-Fenwal, Inc. in 1991.

Harting said, “We have to be perfect in an imperfect world. Our OEM customers expect perfection, and we deliver consistent products that meet their varied requirements. It’s really something when you consider how many points of failure there are on a PC board. It could be 80 or 90 possible points of failure when you count all the components and joints. Our products are also highly effective for the tasks they are asked to perform. We constantly strive to offer the best value package to our OEMs of price, engineering, responsive technical support, continuous improvement and flexible manufacturing. This combination has proven to deliver high reliability, safety and low warranty claims and returns. In a competitive world, we continue to reduce our costs through quality engineering while driving defects to zero.”