Defective products

In short, the abolition of privity opened manufacturers to HabiUty for negligence. Plaintiffs, however, could not estabUsh claims merely by proving that they were harmed by defective products from a manufacturer. The requirement that classic fault be estabUshed often stood as a formal barrier to a successhil tort action. 

New Definitions of Defect. The concept espoused by Section 402A of the Restatement (Second) of Torts, namely, that a manufacturer was strictly Hable for selling a defective product and that proof of fault was unnecessary, worked well with regard to products that contained manufactuting defects. 

It also implies that not all major nonconformities are indicative of a failure of the quality system to prevent shipment of defective product. 

As stated above, commitment is not something for which you can legislate. The management has to be committed to quality in other words it must not knowingly ship defective products or give inferior service. It must do what it says it will do and no less. 

You could use your own reject note or nonconformity report format to notify the customer of a defective product but these are not appropriate if the product is lost. You also need a customer response to the problem and so a form that combines both a statement of the problem and of the solution would be more appropriate. 

As stated previously, traceability is fundamental to establishing and eliminating the root cause of nonconforming product and therefore it should be mandatory in view of the requirements for Corrective Action. Providing traceability can be an onerous task. Some applications require products to be traced back to the original ingot from which they were produced. In situations of safety or national security it is necessary to identify product in such a manner because if a product is used in a critical application and subsequently found defective, it may be necessary to track down all other products of the same batch and eliminate them before there is a disaster. It happens in product recall situations. It is also very important in the automobile and food industries in fact, any industry where human life may be at risk due to a defective product being in circulation. 

It should be noted that very few standard product liability policies provide cover for liability for the costs of repairing or replacing defective products or those, which fail to perform as intended, nor for the costs of any necessary product recall. The insurer s liability in any one period of insurance for injury or damage caused by products during that period shall not exceed the selected limit of indemnity. 

They are the operating quality costs of prevention and appraisal that are considered to be controllable quality costs. Add that in year 2000 the IRS decided to let companies deduct ISO 9000 costs as a business expense. Also there are the internal and external failure costs. As the controllable cost of prevention and appraisal increases, the uncontrollable cost of internal and external failure decreases. At some point the cost of prevention and appraising defective product exceeds the cost of correcting for the product failure. This point is the optimum operating quality cost. 

We now proceed as we did for the stoichiometric case, namely to develop defect- concentration equations for the non-stoichiometric case. Consider the effect of Anti-Frenkel defect production. From Table 2-1, we get Kaf with its associated equation, kAF In Table 2-2, we use Kxi for X-interstitial sites. Combining these, we get ... 

If an analytical test results in a lower value x, < x0, then the customer may reject the product as to be defective. Due to the variation in the results of analyses and their evaluation by means of statistical tests, however, a product of good quality may be rejected or a defective product may be approved according to the facts shown in Table 4.2 (see Sect. 4.3.1). Therefore, manufacturer and customer have to agree upon statistical limits (critical values) which minimize false-negative decisions (errors of the first kind which characterize the manufacturer risk) and false-positive decisions (errors of the second kind which represent the customer risk) as well as test expenditure. In principle, analytical precision and statistical security can be increased almost to an unlimited extent but this would be reflected by high costs for both manufacturers and customers. 

Manufacturers of products placed into commerce (including pharmaceutical manufacturers) are liable for harms caused by their defective products without the need for the plaintiff to prove that the manufacturer was negligent or at fault. This approach, known as strict liability, is one of the main approaches used in product liability cases. Strict liability is based on the three-part rationale that manufacturers are in a better position to spread... 

Control Charts. The control chart approach (Montgomery, 1985), commonly used in manufacturing quality control in another form of screening (for defective product units), offers some desirable characteristics. 

This is the waste coming from the production of defective products. The manufacturing unit must set up a system to produce the right products first time in order to avoid the production of defective products, which are either discarded or reprocessed, incurring a significant cost to the organization. A ""defective product for an analytical laboratory is considered any activity or analytical results without ary practical use to the laboratory. 

One of the misunderstandings with the traditional (western) way of quality thinking is that it is not needed to improve quality above the specification limit because the product is already good. But a product with increased quality (closer to the target) performs better and induces less complaints from customers. The latter reason is more important than most people think as it will not only save the manufacturer cost in replacing defective products, but it will also contribute to an increased confidence and goodwill of the customer towards the manufacturer. 

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