Response to case study scenario 1

I am a junior engineer which works in the safety testing group at a company that manufactures USB flash memory drives. On Monday, I read the report of 200 tests from last week in which I notice that 3 tests of the power consumption had failed with the potential to lead to a fire hazard. The batch from last week was a large order and it has was already delivered to an important client over the weekend. Soon as I found this problem I reported it to my supervisor who manages the safety testing group. The manager tells you to ignore the problem because 3 failed tests are a small percentage when compared to a total of 200 tests. So I need to make a decision on what to do next.

When making a decision on what to do I needed to identify the objectives, criteria and alternatives of the problem when done this I can then select my choice. The objectives of my choice is to work out what need to be the outcome from my decision, in this case the two objectives are to help the company make money and improve or if the costumer is important and the risk they might be in from the product. Both objectives might lead you down the same place but for different reason. So I am going use personal experience and past example to help with this. When I have worked in large companies like apple I have found following their company codes of conduct (each company may have different names for this) is very important to keep employees offering same service across its company. Even if employees have more experience or knowledge they are not expected to provided until they reach cretin level in the company, what trying to say is it better to follow along blindly as promotion is often is given to these people and when in a point of importance to actual make a change, as people that try do it to early or in away that difference to the code of conduct as it will be ignored/discarded. As I learnt personally the hard way. If we look at what other companies have done with similar information. The most common examples are more with batteries but lead to the same end results. Here are same examples of recalls the detail of % that failed are unavailable, still useful so “Dell recalled 4.1 million notebook computer batteries made by Sony because of overheating and fire risks.”. Then, “Apple recalled 1.8 million iBook and PowerBook laptop batteries that were also made by Sony.” This show that two of biggest computer manufacture found fire was a massive risk.

From this if I have made the decision to take the following actions. To informed my supervisor to of the problem if he said to ignore the problem I would look at the company code of conduct and follow it, this would include me to inform him in writhing (maybe by email) of what we discussed and other examples (like the examples above), I would also contact my supervisor’s supervisor too in same manner. Then leave it at that as this passes the any responsibly off me to them, with least unnecessary inconvenience. The alternative which I wouldn't do is to got public with it and tell costumer or feature like internet blog or new media.