Product Safety When Buying from China: Avoid Negligence

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Dan Harris wrote an article about product safety (How to Reduce Your Foreign Manufactured Product Liability Risks) that will, hopefully, open the eyes of many people to the risks they are exposed to.

I thought it particularly interesting because he went through typical questions asked of importers that resold unsafe products:

To convince recalcitrant clients of the need for product liability protection for the products they are having made overseas, I sometimes send them the following deposition questions asked of a U.S. manufacturer whose China-made product had badly injured a child&#;

Let&#;s go through this list of 7 questions, one at a time. I&#;ll suggest what importers should have done to be in a position to offer solid responses to each of them&#;

1. How did you choose your China product supplier in the first place? What sort of due diligence did you do on that supplier?

There are really two cases here.

If the product was designed by the importer, this should focus on preventing manufacturing inconsistency. An audit of the supplier&#;s quality management system, and confirmation that they do own/control the manufacturing facility, should already help a lot.

If the product is purchased &#;off the shelf&#;, the buyer&#;s due diligence should include what I mentioned above, but it should also try to detect design-related risks &#; related to the users&#; foreseeable behaviors, of potential &#;design defects&#;, etc.

(Most people think buying such standard products can be done with a very hands-off process, but a risk analysis might suggest a very hands-on approach.)

2. Did you clearly put your specifications in your contract with your Chinese supplier? Was your contract written so as to actually bind your manufacturer under Chinese law? How do you know that it was?

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3. Can you show me the provisions in your contract relating to product quality and safety? What product specifications did you require of your Chinese manufacturer? Is this in your contract with them? Where?

You have to define your requirements in a specific way, and it&#;s always good to sign an enforceable contract with the manufacturer.

And here, again, many companies buy existing products and seem to think the specifications should come from the manufacturer. For laptops or smartphones that&#;s often the case (although not always at the level of details needed), but for furniture or gym equipment, for instance, it usually isn&#;t.

And, if you design your own product, you really need to take the time to define your requirements. Communicating it in Wechat calls is not a good practice. The R&D engineers should make it a testing plan and should apply it to their prototypes!

4. Did you just go with what your Chinese supplier was telling you about the safety of its product or did you test it yourself? Please describe each and every product test you conducted.

Certain safety requirements are very clearly specified by the relevant authorities (e.g. UL, FCC, CPSIA, CE, REACH, and so on and so forth). If you don&#;t confirm compliance with those standards, you will probably be blamed for serious negligence if an issue lands you in court. Testing is not a must (for example, all the materials may already be certified as food safe), but you need to take reasonable steps.

Other safety issues are a bit trickier. But, at the very least, conduct a structured approach to risk analysis & mitigation.

5. What exactly did you do to make sure the product you were getting from China confirmed to your contract and to applicable U.S. product safety regulations?

Sending inspectors and sending samples to a laboratory for testing is usually a good idea. Otherwise, you are leaving things to chance and what you receive may not be what you specified.

(There are, of course, exceptions that are reasonable. If the supplier has a strong track record and they share their own QC data with you, for example, relaxing your inspection program is usually fine.)

6. What made you first suspect problems with the product? Did you at that time immediately cease importing them?

If you have a well-functioning monitoring system (inspection, testing, other reporting&#;) and your team is given a clear escalation process, you should become aware of safety-related issues when they start to be noticed. And you should probably have a plan to deal with them, as part of the risk mitigation plan I mentioned above.

7. What would it have cost you per unit to fix the problems?

If you know there is a safety-related issue and you don&#;t do proper containment of the problem, that&#;s bad. If the cost is not very high for your company, that&#;s even worse.

Now, as a buyer, what do you need to do in a proactive way?

I wrote about it before in Why YOU Need a Product Safety Program:

A product safety program would typically include:

• Overview of related product safety regulations & standards

• Analysis of the &#;human factors&#;: who will use the product, in what conditions and for what purpose, and how could they misuse it?

• Successive reviews of, and actions about, product safety risks at each step of the development

• A formal risk assessment plan &#; this is usually blended with a quality & reliability risk assessment

• A quality assurance plan that includes compliance testing, reliability testing, product inspections, etc. and that targets all the high and medium risks across the supply chain (including at the material/component level)

• Treatment of the residual risk (which hasn&#;t been eliminated) through user warnings etc.

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How about you? Do you take these steps to assure product safety and keep yourself and your brand compliant? Let me know, please.

P.S.

You might also like to read these related articles:

You&#;ve put your heart and soul into a new product, even got to the stage of developing a prototype. Now you need to find the right supplier to bring your product to life. This is a big step and a crucial one for any business, especially for companies that manufacture for the hardware industry.

Insight Solutions has helped over 120 US and European startups to find and evaluate suppliers. With our extensive experience, we&#;ve developed a series of ten key questions every startup must think about and ask when selecting suppliers.

For more information, please visit china safety products.

And we post them here for you to have a quick reference. Think of it as a checklist, and you&#;ll have more confidence when selecting your suppliers.

1. How much do they know about your business?

This question can help you to determine why they are interested in working with you.

If the supplier has done their homework, they will be able to explain in detail why you are a good fit working with their organization.

We suggest you to ask more in-depth questions to verify their true understanding of your business. For example:

• How many small customers have they worked with over the past 3 years?
• What&#;s the average revenue and longevity engagement with these small customers?
• What similar product/project have they worked with?

Gain a basic understanding of their strengths to see if they bring the skills and experience to your business.

 2. How do you allocate resources to projects?

During your initial meeting, you may meet many good project team members and see a lot of good machines and learn about the company&#;s mature manufacturing processes. You are very excited and may even think that they can do almost everything for you.

However, you need to know the company&#;s internal resources allocation strategy clearly. Without such an understanding, you may become frustrated when you don&#;t get the support needed.

So, how should you verify future resources support? Here are some simple questions that may get you started:

• What is your capabilities in terms of xxx. Will they be used in my project?
• How many resources are employed to different projects?
• How large are the annual sales of your top 5 clients?

Be direct, get all the information you need up front, and never assume anything. Always ask questions to determine how important you will be to this supplier.

3. How do you manage new product projects re design and engineering support?

You have developed a cool product, and time-to-market is crucial to your success. When you select suppliers, verify if the supplier has an experienced team, a mature NPD process and systems in place to give you the necessary new production introduction (NPI) support.

Ask what lessons they have learned from past projects and what will be the specific NPI support solution for your project.

75% of the projects from Kickstarter failed to meet the first shipment date and part of the reason was they worked with an inexperienced supplier.

4. May I visit a few of your critical component suppliers?

Selecting a right contract manufacturer is not the final step for supplier selection.

Rather than relying on a contract manufacturer to do everything, it&#;s very important for you to visit a few key component suppliers to understand their capabilities and relationship with the contract manufacturer.

If your contract manufacturer won&#;t allow you to meet with their key suppliers, you need to re-consider working with them. It&#;s important for you to have full visibility into your supply chain.

5. Will you be transparent about all costs?

Everybody likes to receive good pricing but some suppliers may increase their pricing or add extra costs after you engage with them. That may be reasonable if there were major changes in design &#; what&#;s been quoted on at the beginning is quite different from the one which is finally manufactured.

However, with an open BOM (Bill of Materials) you are in a better position to have the supplier justifying the cost increase.

Sometimes, suppliers tend not to be transparent about the cost breakdown. They either want to hide some margin, or they don&#;t trust you. Nevertheless, it&#;s not recommended to rely on suppliers who are not willing to provide a breakdown of their BOM.

6. What&#;s the most challenging quality issues you&#;ve solved for a start-up?

Suppliers always say they have high quality standards and manage their quality control effectively.

In order to verify how they manage their quality issues, request an example of a difficult quality issues they ever solved. Evaluate what they did with what process and tools were used, who was in charge and ultimately what were the results.

It would be more efficient if you or your quality team meet directly with the team who was responsible for that case. That will help you to find out if their quality management system and personnel are professional and consistent.

7. Can you propose a project schedule?

Project schedules are a critical part for every business. We can see most of the hardware startups delayed the whole project schedule due to lacking of suppliers&#; professional input.

By walking through their whole schedule proposal, you can verify if the suppliers can help you to anticipate technical and supply chain risks and if they are experienced in mitigating these risks.

8. How do you protect customers&#; IP (Intellectual Property)?

There are thousands of companies outsourcing their manufacturing to China. The benefits in terms of price alone can be substantial. However, IP protection must be taken into account whenever you turn your IP over to any manufacturing partner, no matter where they are located.

Signing a Non-Disclosure-Agreement (NDA) is necessary but it&#;s not enough to completely protect you and your IP.

It&#;s always important to verify the integrity of a future manufacturing partner in a number of different ways.

Ask detailed questions on how they protect their clients IP. Ask to speak with current and past customers to see how their IPs are well protected. Ask to see if they have solid policies, processes, and systems in place to support IP protection.

9. How can I get net 60 days payment term?

Negotiating terms as a new client is always difficult.

Both parties are new to each other. The best way to initiate the process is to first provide the new supplier with sufficient financial background information of your company. Ask for their internal payment terms, credit line policy and approval process. Understand what you can do to achieve better payment terms step by step.

This will also help you to do the cash projection more accurately.

10. Have you plans to move production to a lower-cost region?

Some manufacturing suppliers for products such as cables, batteries, plastic injection, metal, etc. are planning to move their mass production to inland China provinces, or to lower cost countries to reduce their labor and facility cost. The facility and production transfer generally takes 8 months to 1 year.

Sometimes your contract manufacturer will remain in China but relocate their sub-suppliers to a lower cost region. You need to ensure a healthy and secure supply chain network and verify all these details before signing an agreement with contract manufacturer.

Manufacturing products for the hardware industry is difficult, especially for startups. You may lack direct connectivity to offshore manufacturing suppliers and have limited experience on the &#;when&#; and &#;how&#; to successfully scale-up production of physical product solutions.That&#;s why it&#;s important to understand and manage suppliers effectively.

With the above 10 questions, you have a good start at finding a manufacturing partner that can help in your success.

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