Lawsuit!: Reducing the Risk of Product Liability for Manufacturers

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The Administrative Team

Developing and implementing a comprehensive product liability prevention (PLP) program and effort in most manufacturing corporations will take a period of many months. The larger the corporation, with multiple plants and divisions, the longer it will take and the more administrative effort it will require.

Typically it is not as complicated as the launching of other major programs such as the implementation of a Quality program, Lean Manufacturing, Six Sigma, or other comprehensive efforts that involve all of the management team, but there are a number of facets to PLP that require investigation, planning, and developmental effort. Because of this the program not only requires the appointment of a champion who becomes the in-house expert, but it will be most effective if a small corporate group is also created, or the administrative team.

Realistically the PLP program should be an enhancement to existing company procedures such as the Quality program, as opposed to it being a stand-alone program, and the newly developed policies should become add-ons to those procedures that are already in place. This is why it has been referred to many times as “The Next Dimension in Quality.”

This focus spreads out into a lot of other areas of the overall operation, basically every area, so it becomes difficult for any one person to successfully spearhead all of it. Realistically, a number of different projects related to the program will be driven simultaneously, which ...