What is the best way to familiarize yourself with the safety risks in your product category? I'd say you should look at recent recalls and lawsuits on non-compliant products similar to yours. There is a lot to learn. Here are two … [Read more...]
How To Do A Product Risk Assessment ‘By The Book’ (for Safety)
How to ensure a product is going to be safe? By conducting a product risk assessment and acting on it. The problem is, if I ask people how they assess risk, I may get widely different answers. A structured approach is needed. And the … [Read more...]
Benefits of Product Design Optimization (Taguchi Method)
I wrote extensively about ways to proactively improve a product's design, in order to avoid quality, reliability, and safety issues. It involves reliability engineering, fail safe designs, and a variety of other objectives to take into … [Read more...]
Why the AQL Inspection System Is Still So Widespread
In the 1930s, some smart statisticians at Bell Labs worked on an amazing amount of manual calculations to suggest sampling plans for product quality inspections. Over time, it became the topic of MIL STD standards and one of those plans … [Read more...]
A Guide… To Guiding! How To Be Effective As A Quality Audit Guide? (with special focus on IATF 16949)
Guest post by Brad Pritts - a followup to How To Prepare For A Factory Audit? Note from Renaud: Let's say your factory is undergoing a quality audit requested by your customer. The auditor will arrive and you are advised to have a … [Read more...]
How To Prepare For A Factory Audit?
From time to time, someone asks me for advice on how to prepare for a factory audit. Since we have run an auditing service for years, we have a few ideas about this. I collected some of my usual advice in this article*. *(I am assuming … [Read more...]
Assembly Fixtures: A Valuable Productivity and Quality Tool
Assembly fixtures are very important tools used in the factory to provide better quality, faster, and cheaper production. Almost every importer will like the sound of those benefits! Checking fixtures are similar, but they … [Read more...]
Process Engineering: Limitations of Most Chinese Suppliers
Recently we were discussing a project with a client whose engineers have been struggling with some key mechanical elements, due (in part) to a lack of precision of those elements. What happened? They have been requesting samples from … [Read more...]
6 Tips To Combat Common Recurring Quality Issues From Your Supplier
What happens if your supplier keeps manufacturing products with various defects, even though you have a quality standard that outlines your expectations? This tends to happen for the same reasons, so here are 6 tips to help you avoid … [Read more...]
How USA & Canada SME Importers Feel about China in early 2023
I recently got back from a trip in the Southwest and Northeast of the USA (for about 3 weeks), and in East Canada (for about 2 weeks). I haven't met a lot of clients for years (or ever) due to difficult traveling, so it was … [Read more...]
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