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Although
Chinese manufacturing sites produced many of the toys that
have been recalled in recent years for safety flaws, the
vast majority of those flaws came not from
China
but from companies in the United States and other
developed nations. Problems with lead paint (which is a
manufacturing flaw) aside, most errors that lead to
recalls—not just of toys but of all kinds of consumer
goods—are design mistakes. As such, they are the
responsibility of the companies that dream up the products
in the first place.
And these
mistakes are highly preventable: Our study of US toy
recalls indicates that companies can do a much better job
of learning to avoid them. The trick is to treat potential
errors just as seriously as the ones that have already
been made and to learn from both types. Even companies
that have never been responsible for harmful product flaws
should be diligent about prevention because recalls can
happen to any consumer-product maker.
It’s
understandable that China has figured prominently in the
recent public discussion of toy recalls. After all, about
80 percent of the toys recalled in the United States in
2006 were manufactured there. But 68 percent of those 25
recalls were due to design flaws.
The US
Consumer Product Safety Commission maintains a public list
of the top consumer hazards and reasons for recalls.
Flawed design—sharp edges, long strings and small
detachable parts, for example—has been the cause of
three-quarters of all US toy recalls since 1988. What’s
more, the same causes repeat year after year, even as the
number of toys that have been taken off the market because
of safety concerns has steadily increased.
Our
research, which entailed a systematic study of some 600 US
toy recalls from 1988 through 2007, along with interviews
of design engineers, manufacturing executives and consumer
advocates, suggests several steps companies can take to
reduce design flaws.
First,
firms should establish a learning culture in which
employees feel safe reporting their concerns about design
flaws and in which mistakes are not ignored. Such a
culture begins with managers simply being receptive to
employees’ ideas and criticisms.
Companies
should also engage in reactive learning: Once a product
flaw is discovered, the firm should examine and improve
the systems and processes that contributed to it. In
addition, companies should engage in the four major types
of proactive learning:
STUDY
competitors’ recalls, overall recall trends, issues
leading to recalls, regulators’ comments, and even medical
journals, which sometimes report health problems resulting
from product use or misuse. A decade before the first
recall in 2006 involving small magnets in toys, for
instance, medical studies reported children rupturing
their intestines after swallowing such items. Even after
that recall, other companies, presumably unaware of the
problem, continued to produce toys containing magnets.
LISTEN
to design and test engineers, whose concerns are often
downplayed or overlooked in the excitement of taking a new
product to market. Graco, for example, produced a cradle
in 1989 with nothing to prevent babies from sliding into a
corner and suffocating, despite engineers’ warnings,
according to Marla Felcher’s It’s No Accident. After
several infant deaths, Graco recalled all 160,000 of the
units sold.
TEST
effectively for safety issues. Too many toy companies rely
on live humans to test product appeal but not safety
features. While dummies are clearly appropriate in
crash-testing car seats and the like, companies can spot
potential dangers by having people use many products in
realistic settings. At the least, such tests would guide
companies in providing clearer instructions and warnings.
TRACK
customer feedback to look for patterns that might reveal
product flaws. In September 2007, one million Simplicity
cribs were recalled because their drop rails detached and
created a gap in which children could get stuck and
asphyxiated. More than three years before that, however,
several customers had alerted the company to the issue,
but to no effect, according to a Chicago Tribune
investigation.
Doing all
this properly requires that companies buck the trend of
downsizing design and testing departments. It also
requires that teams be set up to monitor the vast amount
of useful information out there, from recall data to
customer complaints. And it requires that these teams be
coordinated at the highest organizational level—by the
executives with responsibility for looking, unflinchingly,
at the big picture.
****
Hari
Bapuji is an assistant professor at the University of
Manitoba’s I.H. Asper School of Business in Winnipeg. Paul
W. Beamish holds the Canada Research Chair in
International Management at the Richard Ivey School of
Business of the
University of
Western Ontario
in London. |
