Product category:
Industrial consultancy services
News Release from: TUV Rheinland UK
Edited by the Manufacturingtalk Editorial
Team on 18 September 2002
Protecting against unsafe product
liability
What is the best way to protect against the liability associated with unsafe products? It starts in the design stage of a product.
The trading standards office in Walsall, West Midlands, UK, have recently successfully undertaken prosecutions against six companies for supplying products that were unsafe The total fines in these cases were UKP27,593, plus the companies' own legal costs and the loss of sales due to the prosecutions
This article was originally published on Manufacturingtalk on 26 Apr 2004 at 8.00am (UK)
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The companies could also be facing prosecution throughout the UK by other trading standard offices for similar reasons.
So what is the best way to protect myself, and the company I work for, from the liability associated with unsafe products? Protection from liability issues starts in the design stage of a product.
Designing with your geographic markets and end use application in mind is key to ensuring a final product that does not require cost prohibitive and time-consuming retrofits.
Further reading
Don't be prosecuted for supplying unsafe products
The trading standards office in Walsall, West Midlands, UK, have recently successfully prosecuted six companies for supplying products that were unsafe.
Making modifications to hazardous machinery
Machinery with particular hazards classified under Annex IV, Machinery Directive, involves a Notified Body and, at minimum, the submission of the technical file (TF) to the Notified Body.
International manufacturers choose one registrar
As automotive parts suppliers have adopted ISO TS 16949 2nd Ed. Automotive Quality management system requirements, international manufacturers tend to choose one global Registrar.
The second stage of this is more of a cost-cutting and timesaving measure.
Buy pre-approved critical components.
This saves having to retest these components individually, which keeps the cost and time to market at acceptable levels.
The next level of protection is to ensure your product is compliant to all of the regulatory requirements that apply to the product.
Ask a third party laboratory to verify for you what they feel are the applicable requirements for your product, even if you will be testing the product at your own test facility.
This is a good way to double check what the actual requirements are.
The biggest part of this is.doing your homework! Now comes the real meat of the protection, test data.
In markets that allow for self-declaration, you could do this with no test data.
This route provides the least protection and in a court of law you would have no basis for defence.
You could do testing in your own lab and then a self-declaration.
This offers you better protection in the courts, but may not satisfy the requirements of all countries and distributors/customers' questions over the integrity of the test data.
Another route is to have an independent third party laboratory do the testing, and you do a self- declaration.
This allows for much better protection in the eyes of the courts and potential distributors or customers.
The highest level of protection from a regulatory perspective is to have a product certified by an independent laboratory.
Certification (sometimes referred to as "listing") of a product generally means that the product is tested to meet applicable standards and that the manufacturing of this product is monitored by the certifying body.
A Certification Mark is used to identify products that meet the requirements of the certification body.
Examples of international recognized certification marks are the TUV Rheinland GS Mark, Q Mark and cTUVus Mark.
The total cost of having all the products referred to at the start of the article independently tested and certified would have been less than the cost of the prosecution brought against the companies.
A full range of product testing and certification services are available from TUV International UK.
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