Response to case study scenario 1

The failure rate may be considered as a quality issue for non critical components, but if this problem were to be ignored then further liabilities due to destruction of property or potential loss of life could occur. Legal liability could be associated with the company who could then investigate what happened and link this to my manager or myself. We could then be held responsible through safety legislation for our actions if it could be proven that we had failed our legal duties. The course of action to prevent this would be to schedule a critical team/group meeting where the safety concerns could be raised and discussed thoroughly. The company is required by safety legislation to set up a system to review employees safety concerns. This allows a quick response to the problem and for the input of all relevant members of the staff. It should consider the various safety concerns and ensure their consequences are adequately discussed and resolved to result in an unbiased conclusion.

In this instance a product warning and recall should be issued. The loss of profit through the faulty product replacement would be considerable once manufacturing cost of the initial product and the replacement product is taken into account. Revenue will obviously be lost due to the time and resources used to manufacture additional products. However, as the client is is a major product purchaser, the company may lose far more future business so a product recall would benefit any future business for them. The damage to their relationship would considerably affect the company's good will.

To avoid legal repercussions a warning message could be issued to the client about the faulty products. This could leave any potential legal liability with the purchaser. This still allows for legal action to be taken against the company for not providing the product/service specified. There is also no defence should the company be found negligent for its activities.

If the issue was with the manufacturing process was ignored the problem would start to affect future products involved wih the faulty process. This could then cause further legal problems and profit loss. Reporting the problem and discussing the current safety issue raises awareness to the relevant team members who can then help to contact the responsible design & manufacturing team members. The company may then take appropriate action from their review.

From my own experience dealing with various computer components, I have found that CPU's pose potential but significant fire hazards. This is due to the high operating temperatures they can reach under rare circumstances. Testing can simulate a variety of these rare conditions which means corrective action can be then be taken to prevent these potential situations occurring.

The risk associated with a "one off" sequence of events that could lead to a fire or worse may seem small, but the consequences are very high and far outway what may be considered a very remote possibilty. The company does not have a robust quality and safety management system if it choses to ignore the junior engineer's safety report about the USB drives.