The World’s Leading Quality Control & Quality Assurance
Company in the Leather, Footwear and Apparel Industries
Achieving the Beauty of Art with Engineering Precision
We provide more than quality control; we provide quality assurance. There are
billion dollar companies out there that have inspectors that go out into the field and bring
back products, compare them to brand specifications, and then say whether or not
they pass inspection.
That's quality control, and when this happens it’s too late to meet manufacturing specifications and standards of the customer. With Impactiva's quality assurance services we take control from the very beginning of the production process to prevent delays, reduce your risks, and eliminate lost sales and lost customers.
Our quality assurance, mold prevention, chemical testing and factory reliability audit services eliminate the time, energy and resources required to repair the negative effects on your brand and company.
Our Purpose
Ensure that the labor intensive manufactured products our customers’ factories produce are made “Right from the Start” while meeting the highest standards of safety, quality and esthetic look.
Impactiva is the Provider of Choice for Major Brands Throughout the World
Established in 2003, Impactiva has quickly become the world's leading quality assurance company in the leather, footwear and apparel industries (accessories, apparel, footwear, leather). Major brands from Asia, Europe and the United States trust us to ensure that their factories produce "Best-in-World" quality.
We assist you to:
- Stop losing sales because your quality is inferior to your competitors
- Reduce factory claims to less than 0.4% of product shipped
- Avoid bad quality lead-time disruptions by producing your shoes “Right the First Time”
- Cut your costs by eliminating >5% of factory waste-errors (rejected or reworked finished product, materials that are cut which are not useable, airfreight caused by delays due to bad quality)
- Eliminate the costly and time consuming friction and arguments with clients and suppliers due to poor quality shipments
- Significantly reduce the negative impact created by mold in your shipments
- Prevent prohibited chemicals from being used in your product
- Eliminate the time, energy and resources required to constantly replace and train in-house inspectors
- Avoid the damage to your brand image and to the quality of your product due to corruption in your quality control team
- Substantially reduce the risk of concentrated sourcing by using Impactiva to gain the flexibility to buy from many regions and/or countries
We achieve this by hiring the best technicians in the industry, training them at our learning centers in Chennai, India and Dongguan, China and permanently placing them at your suppliers throughout Asia, Europe and South America. Impactiva currently has a team of more than 220 professionals performing quality assurance for suppliers in 10 countries throughout Asia, Europe and South America. We will place technicians in any country, city, factory or material vendor where you need to source your products.
Our leading edge systems, processes and procedures are revolutionary, yet simple, helping to teach and coach your suppliers, from owner to factory workers (whom we train and psychologically motivate to become artisans) so that the product is produced "Right the First Time".
Our motto, "Achieving the Beauty of Art with Engineering Precision" is highlighted by the pride we take in deeply understanding our customer's esthetic look and fit requirements and by the precision we use to measure our performance and the quality of our work: defects found per each million units shipped.
Our service commitments are simple:
- +99.60% of the units shipped without problems (+98.0% in our leather service)
- Satisfying our customers beyond their HIGHEST expectations
Confidentiality and Neutrality
Impactiva prides itself on being an integral part of our customer’s team and thus are privy to a wealth of information related to our customer’s supply chain. In order to maintain the confidentiality of said information, we are neither in the sourcing information business (i.e. we do not recommend factories or material vendors) nor get involved in our customer’s finance-logistics-customs transactions. We do not perform the multiple functions of an agent/trader as we focus solely on the world of quality assurance.
Impactiva’s Shareholders
Jose R. Suarez is the majority shareholder who has been in the leather, footwear and apparel industry since 1991. Mr. Suarez successfully founded and operated during the 1990’s Tri-Commerce, a hide trading company based in Igualada, Spain which was well known as the number one supplier with respect to quality of Eastern European wet salted cow hides and wet blue. In 1999, he founded leatherXchange, a marketplace for the world of hides and leather with 20 million euros of financing from Amadeus Capital Partners and the venture capital subsidiaries of Banco Santander, Rabo Bank and TNT. Mr. Suarez sold leatherXchange in June of 2003 purchasing the nascent quality control division of leatherXchange from his shareholders using it as the foundation to launch Impactiva that same year. Mr. Suarez has a Bachelors of Science and Masters of Engineering degree in Operations Research and Industrial Engineering from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
Stanley Motta is a Panamanian business man involved in many activities. He is presently Chairman of the Board of Copa Holdings (NYSE symbol CPA) the parent of Copa Airlines based in Panama and Copa Colombia Airlines based in Colombia. As Chairman of Grupo Financiero Continental he negotiated a merger with Banco General to form BG Financial Holdings in early 2007 thus forming the largest privately held bank in the region. He continues as President of Motta Internacional a wholesale distributor and operator of Duty Free Stores in the region. Mr. Motta was Chairman of Autoridad de la Region Interoceanica (ARI) until May 2000. This was a government entity that received all the assets that were not part of the Panama Canal Operations as a result of the Torrijos Carter Treaty between the United States and Panama. Mr. Motta resides in Panama and continues to be active in many industries including television, auto distribution, insurance and trustee of ANCON a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting the environment. He is also a member of the Board of the Trust of the Americas affiliated with the Organization of American States and Chairman of Sumarse a organization promoting CSR in Panama.
Board of Advisors
Robert Bohlen is a Graduate in animal science from the University of Illinois, he soared to the top of the purebred cattle breeding business and worked to provide as embryo transfer, embryo freezing and sexing through his sponsorship of veterinarians in this field. He bred and produced numerous national and international champions in several breeds of beef cattle. He also judged at most of the major beef cattle shows in the USA and Canada.
Bohlen was also instrumental in developing the certified Angus Beef Program now featured in many of America’s leading restaurants and grocery stores. He was a founder and principal of Premier Beef, Premier Corp, and Premier Angus. These entities were involved in cattle ranching, breeding, feedlot and meat packing operations located in 18 states. He later headed companies in the Coal Mining, Finance, Document Destruction, Real Estate Brokerage, Residential Construction, Interior Design, Title Insurance, and Property Mortgage fields. Bohlen was the number one out of 39,000 real estate agents in the world for Prudential Real Estate 10 out of the 11 years he was associated with them based on total commission income. His firm, Preview Properties, was consistently in the Top 5 single offices with Prudential out of 1600 offices. His firm was based in a town of 5500 residents in Brighton, Michigan.
Bohlen continues to practice Real Estate Brokerage with his wife, Lillian Montalto. Together they own Signature Properties in Andover, MA. Bohlen is also the principal shareholder with a portfolio of 2000 residential apartments and approx 15,000,000 square feet of office arehouse and retail space, which his management co., Anyi Management manages and operates.
Roberto Saco is a principal at Aporia Advisors, a boutique consulting firm, specializing in designing business processes/services and in organizational change. He believes that “design practices” help tackle the increasing complexity business leaders face today. When not consulting in banking, healthcare or IT, he may be found teaching on the topics of service quality and innovation, or enabling leaders in the not-for-profit sector. He worked more than 20 years for American Express Company in their financial services division holding positions such as Vice President of Quality and Vice President of Strategic Planning.
Roberto is a Past-President of the American Society for Quality (ASQ), the world’s leading association for performance improvement professionals with more than 80,000 members. At ASQ, he founded and chaired the Social Responsibility Advisory Council.
He participated in the National Performance Excellence program at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST, U.S. Department of Commerce) serving for eight years as Sr. Examiner for the Malcolm Baldrige National Performance Excellence Award. He is also a judge for the Florida Governor’s Sterling Award which recognizes organizations for their performance excellence. Roberto is currently a board member of the Florida Sterling Council and the Miami Light Project, organizations which strive to improve the quality of life in their communities.
Regis Vogel has served 15 years as an IT leader in the textile, B2B and manufacturing industries in positions such as CTO, Chief Architect, Head of Software Development and Chief R&D Officer. He has participated on industry boards for global organizations such as Eclipse (IBM), and as a founding board member of the ECMFA (European Conference on Modeling Foundations and Applications).
He has spearheaded multiple critical path technology initiatives in major organizations such as the University of Michigan, where he was selected to represent all non-academic units on the IT Steering Committee of the University CIO. His industrial R&D has been published in numerous peer-reviewed papers and he has won numerous awards for developing and implementing technology best practices, most recently receiving the 2010 global award from the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE).
His academic degrees are from Pierre and Marie Curie University (Paris University VI), spanning computer science, artificial intelligence, model driven engineering, software and systems engineering and electrical and embedded systems. He has published numerous peer-reviewed papers on leading edge software engineering disciplines such as MDE/A.
