Question

Customer Victimized by Poor Product Quality

The R&D group in the Super-Duper company is pressured to quickly develop a product to counter a recently commercialized competitive product that is rapidly taking business away from Super-Duper. In order to match the performance of the competitive product, the Super-Duper chemist needs to make a novel mixture, blending chemicals together that have never been blended before. The mixture looks stable; however, because of the urgent need for the product, the SOP for checking long term product stability is not followed. Instead of tracking stability for one month at three different temperatures, the product formula is released to manufacturing after one week of testing. Several thousand gallon of the product are manufactured and shipped to customers. Meanwhile, after one month of product stability testing, the chemist notices some sludge and gas formation in some of the samples. He is reluctant to inform his supervisor and other company personnel about his findings.

Those customers who received the product inform the Super-Duper sales staff that when they try to pump the product, their pumps get clogged, and cannot use the product.

What is the root cause of the product failure, as well as other irresponsible behaviors.

Answer 1

Ans:

The maing root cause of the failure was the urgency of comptetive product development which influenced the chemist to not test the product as per the standard operating procedures which is responsible for lont term stability of product. The SOP meant to be followed to get the better results and Chemist who didnot intended to inform his supervisor as well as other responsible personnel of the companies. This was the biggest irreponsibility of the chemist to not inform the responsible personnel about this problem and let the prodcut delivered to customer which will damage the image and reputation of company. Test was ment to be perform responsibly without creating any urgency to deliver the product to customer.