Management

Most manufacturing companies in today’s competitive industries, have fairly good operating procedures or Quality programs in place. Most efforts in product design and engineering are also well intentioned. To maintain a high standing in industry and gain the competitive edge, manufacturers must make every effort to continuously improve their products and processes and pursue new areas of opportunity, or they’re soon eliminated.

Leading companies are often certified to the QS or ISO 9000 quality standard or other similar programs as it relates to their Total Quality program and effort. In addition, they may have even created their own test labs or built Technology Centers for designing and testing their new products and materials for tomorrow. And yet, with all of these quality and engineering programs in place, numerous manufacturers continue to be hit by major product liability lawsuits. Some are even put out of business.

As some manufacturers are hit by steady streams of frivolous lawsuits, others may experience periodic blockbusters. Defense costs, out of court settlements, and/or high profile verdicts can have a major impact on the bottom line and drain the funds that would have otherwise gone into profit sharing, investment and growth. This unfortunate reality forces many manufacturers to pay ever-rising insurance premiums or face constant expenditures in self-insured programs.

The insurance industry claims, it spends as much on defending corporate policyholders against product liability actions, as it spends in negotiating settlements or paying in plaintiff verdicts. To them they’re going to lose either way, so the objective is to just get out for the least amount possible. Because of this, insurance companies tend to focus their efforts on controlling the costs of legal defense and pursuing early settlements, despite the possible lack of credibility surrounding the case. These actions are definitely to the disadvantage of the manufacturer, but have become so common place to plaintiff and defense attorneys, that many, if not most, immediately plan for such moves and begin to negotiate settlements in the earliest stages of an action.

This new focus will hopefully be highly significant in reducing the chances of product liability exposure to begin with, and helping to avoid the potential for lawsuits and litigation.

SPECIALIZING IN THE NEW FOCUS

Because of the growing demand and effectiveness of this new focus, law firms and insurance companies are becoming more and more involved in the field of education. Naturally for the insurance companies such education of manufacturers leads to substantial reductions in exposure to risk and losses for the carrier as well. Although it is in its infancy, this program is one of the most credible to have pounded on the door of manufacturers in the past 15 years. It is also one of the few corporate improvement programs members of management can instantly recognize as being one of the most beneficial.

Although manufacturers for many years have focused on product safety and hazards analysis programs to varying degrees, especially in their engineering areas, the scope of Product Liability Prevention goes well beyond that narrow focus and deals with numerous other areas of management. This involves the entire management team, and not just the engineering functions. Engineering departments normally have little to do with bringing about changes to the overall operating procedures of a company, but instead only tend to focus on their specific area of product design. Many of the aspects of PLP deal with other areas of the operation besides just the design of the product.

INITIATING THE CORPORATE EFFORT

The first step for a manufacturer to develop a PLP program, is to select the right internal candidate to champion the effort. As with most corporate programs, although everyone in management ends up being involved, there needs to be one primary person who is the team leader and heads up the function. For larger companies, this also involves creating a Corporate Product Liability Review Team to help deal with many overall issues, especially in multi-plant organizations.

Once the primary players are in place, it is time to educate the company as to what Product Liability Prevention is all about. This is best handled by in-house seminars with the entire management team.

AREAS ADDRESSED

In the in-house seminar the management team would learn how PLP focuses on all the following areas and more:

Contracts & Agreements Teaching the importance of customer contract reviews, wording that needs to be contained in purchase orders with suppliers and subcontractors, contractual considerations for products shipping overseas.

Product Design The most critical first step in the product life cycle. The least expensive time to recognize a potential problem and make a change. Teaching the management team how to hold effective Design Reviews; How to comprise the Design Review Team as well as the Product Safety Team, and teaching the Design Review Team their roles and responsibilities for achieving effective design reviews, and the Safety Team the elements of Hazards Analysis and Risk Assessment.

Marketing / Advertising Teaching the team about potential problems with their marketing and advertising campaigns, things that can be viewed as "guarantees" against potential hazards and create exposure, as well as other promoted activities with the product that can lead to personal injury.

Reliability Testing Discussing the importance of performing adequate reliability tests on new products, as well as teaching the manufacturer how to document and deal with possible product problems and negative test results.

Document Control Teaching the entire manufacturing organization how important the documents they generate are, and helping them recognize the potential dangers in what they write, the proverbial "smoking gun" per se, as well as teaching them how to deal with delicate product issues and decisions.

Warranties Explaining breach of warranty, the issues of implied and expressed warranties, and how these things can enter into a product liability lawsuit if they’re not controlled properly.

Warning Labels & Instructions Educating the team to recognize when the need exists for developing warning labels, how to design them, their placement, the standards that exist for warning label design, what concerns should be incorporated into warning labels versus operating instructions.

Records Retention Teaching the management team the importance of proper records retention, immediate accessibility, what types of records need to be maintained and for how long.

Supplier Selection Going beyond product, price and delivery capabilities and D&B ratings, and addressing the issues related to product liability concerns, insurance requirements, indemnification agreements and more. Reviewing what Purchase Orders need to state in fine print, ensuring they are adequately protected against the supplier’s or subcontractor’s mistakes and more.

Recall Procedures Companies need to know what the game plan will be should they ever need to conduct a product recall, and not try to develop the game plan in that moment of crisis. Knowing the different options available, when to actually recall the product versus just sending out notices, other organizations that may need to be contacted by law, etc.

Liability Incidents & Investigation Teaching the newly created In-house Expert and Corporate Team how to recognize potential liability incidents as well as how to properly handle these initial notifications. Learning how to investigate incidents when first reported, gathering the facts, and writing reports.

Litigation Teaching the In-house Expert and Corporate Liability Team the many stages of a product liability lawsuit and what to expect. What will be demanded, the chain of events, their responsibilities, and how they can help. Working with the insurance representatives and assigned counsel on the case, and helping answer questions, gather documents, conduct tests, etc. This is especially the case for those corporations that don’t have an in-house Legal department.

IMPRESSIVE RESULTS

The end results of such in-house seminars for manufacturers are very impressive and the changes are highly noticeable as the entire management team begins to speak a whole new language. They understand and thoroughly buy into the new concern and focus, and as a result, bring about substantial improvements to the safety and reliability of the products they create, as well as major improvements in many other areas of management practices.

OPPORTUNITIES FOR INSURANCE CARRIERS

Because this program will be significant in helping to bring about substantial improvements in product reliability and safety, as well as major reductions in risk exposure, it should also be heavily endorsed and supported by the insurance companies. Much like paying for preventive medicine in order to reduce the risk of major illness and much larger medical bills, the same type of encouragement and financial support should happen here too.

Insurance companies should recognize the benefits of having their manufacturing clients be under the guidance and care of a product liability prevention consultant or adviser, in order to help avoid a critical or fatal incident. Surely paying for an ounce of prevention here will be worth a pound of cure.

(Randall Goodden is the author of the new book Product Liability Prevention – A Strategic Guide (Quality Press, 2000) and Preventing & Handling Product Liability, (Marcel Dekker Publishers, 1995). He has had numerous articles published in the leading Corporate, professional and legal magazines, and is a featured speaker at conferences and universities around the world.)

Basics of Personal Time Management

By Ranjit Acharya

PTM is about controlling the use of your most valuable (and undervalued) resource. Consider this question: when was the last time you scheduled a review of your time allocation?

The absence of PTM is characterized by last minute rushes to meet deadlines, meetings which are either double booked or achieve nothing, days which seem somehow to slip unproductively by, crises which evolve unexpectedly from nowhere. This sort of environment leads to unnecessary stress and lack of performance: it must be stopped. Don’t you think so?

Poor time management is often a symptom of over confidence: techniques, which used to work with small projects and workloads, are simply reused with large ones. But inefficiencies, which were insignificant in the small role, are widely visible in the large. You cannot drive a motor bike like a bicycle, nor can you manage a supermarket-chain like a small cold store. The demands, the problems and the operational costs for increased efficiency are all larger as your responsibility grows; you must learn to apply proper techniques or be trained for betterment by those who do.

PTM has many aspects. There is the simple concept of keeping an well-ordered diary and the related idea of planned activity.

PTM is a set of tools that allow you to eliminate wastage. It helps you to prepare for meetings, refuse excessive workloads, monitor project’s progress, allocate resource (time) etc. Plan each day efficiently, plan each week effectively, and do so simply with a little self-discipline.

Since PTM is a management process just like any other, it must be planned, monitored and regularly reviewed personally by none other than you. In the following section let us all examine the basic methods and functions of PTM. Since true understanding depends upon experience, you will be asked to take part by looking at aspects of your own work. If you do not have time to do this right now - ask yourself: why not?

What is required from you is the adoption of certain practices, which will give you greater control over the use and allocation of your primary resource: time. Before we start on the future, it is worth considering the present. This involves the simplistic task of keeping a note of how you spend your time for a suitably long period of time (say a week). It is very much simple since all you have to do is create a simple table, photocopy half-a-dozen copies and carry it around with you filling in a row every time you change activity. After one week, allocate time (start as you mean to go on) to review this log.

We are looking here to simply eliminate wastage in our current practice. The first step is a critical appraisal of how you spend your time and to question some of your habits. In your time log, identify periods of time, which might have been better used.

There are various sources of waste. The most common are social: telephone calls, friends dropping by, conversations around the reception area and most common these days in our context is surfing the net that too around the pages which do not match our career interest. It would be foolish to eliminate all non-work related activity (we all need a break). But if it’s a choice between chatting to Hari in the afternoon and meeting the deadline for the submission of next proposal ... Your time log will show you if this is a problem and you might like to do something about it before your boss does.

In your time log, look at each work activity and decide objectively how much time each was worth to you, and compare that with the time you actually spent on it. An afternoon spent in a meeting conducted to decide on next meeting’s agenda (happens mostly in our public sector organizations) is a waste; an hour spent debating on the yesterdays bandh is a waste; a minute spent sorting out the stapler pins is waste (unless relaxation). This type of activity will be reduced naturally by managing your own time since you will not allocate time to these activities. Specifically, if you have a task to do, decide beforehand how long it should take and work to that deadline - then move on to the next task.

Another common source of waste is from delaying work, which is unpleasant, by finding distractions, which are less important or unproductive. Check your log to see if any tasks are being delayed simply because they are dull or difficult.

Time is often wasted in changing between activities. For this reason it is useful to group similar tasks together thus avoiding the start-up delay of each.

Having considered what is complete waste; we now turn to what is merely inappropriate. Often it is simpler to do the job yourself. Using your own time to stamp and write address on the envelope ensures they leave immediately; writing the missing summary in the latest progress report from your junior is more pleasant than sending it back (and it lets you choose the emphasis). Rubbish!

Assigning secretarial duties to secretaries can make large gains: they regularly catch the next post, they type a lot faster than you do. If you have a task which could be done by a subordinate, use the next occasion to start training him/her to do it instead of doing it yourself - you will need to spend some time monitoring the task thereafter, but far less than that in doing it yourself. Remember "never do a task, which your subordinates or juniors can also do."

A major impact upon your work can be the tendency to help others with theirs. Now, in the spirit of an open and harmonious work environment it is obviously desirable that you should be willing to help out - but check your work log and decide how much time you spend on your own work and how much you spend on others’. This usually happens in our country no matter whether it is private sector or public. Often when we visit offices we find that officers are out of their rooms and they are found telling other colleague how to perform the particular job or giving hints about the new way of surfing the net.

The next stage of PTM is to start taking control of your time. The first problem is appointments. Start with a simple appointment diary. In this book you will have (or at least should have) a complete list of all your known appointments for the foreseeable future. If you have omitted your regular ones (since you remember them anyway) add them now.

Your appointments constitute your interaction with other people; they are the agreed interface between your activities and those of others; they are determined by external obligation. They often fill the diary. Now, be ruthless and eliminate the unnecessary. There may be committees where you can not productively contribute or where a subordinate might be (better) able to participate. There may be long lunches those could be better run as short conference calls. There may be interviews, which last three times as long as necessary because they are scheduled for a whole hour. Eliminate the wastage starting today.

The next stage is to add to your diary lists of other, personal activity which will enhance your use of the available time. Consider what is the most important type of activity to add to your diary? The single most important types of activity are those, which will save your time: allocate time to save time, a stitch in time saves days. And most important of all, always allocate time to time management: at least five minutes each and every day.

PTM is a systematic application of common sense strategies. It requires little effort, yet it promotes efficient work practices by highlighting wastage and it leads to effective use of time by focusing it on your chosen activities. PTM does not solve your problems; it reveals them, and provides a structure to implement and monitor solutions. It enables you to take control of your own time - how you use it is then up to you.

‘Product Liability Prevention’ Programs for Manufacturers