Despite Expected Rise in Regulatory Scrutiny, Few are Prepared to Manage Product Safety Crises

While 42.1 percent of respondents to a recent Deloitte poll expect government agency scrutiny of product safety to increase through 2017, just 15.1 percent are fully prepared to manage a product safety or quality crisis.

One-fifth (19.2 percent) of respondents reported that their companies experienced a business disruption due to a product compliance, safety, or quality-related issue within the past 12 months. Respondents reported higher incident rates in the consumer product (38.5 percent), automotive (36.4 percent), life sciences (35.6 percent) and industrial product (34.8 percent) sectors.

“The stakes continue to rise on product safety and quality management,” observes Don Mays, Deloitte Advisory managing director of product safety and quality with Deloitte & Touche LLP. “Lapses in product safety and quality can do significant financial and brand reputation damage. Taking a centralized, collaborative and analytics-enabled approach to effectively manage product integrity can help companies identify and respond to emerging issues more quickly.”

More than one-third (34.6 percent) of respondents' organizations have secured predictive analytics technologies to support product safety and quality management, but just 5.6 percent describe their use as “advanced.”

“Advanced analytics and data science remain largely untapped in product safety and quality management, often because it takes time and money to shift programs from largely manual, lookback efforts into centralized predictive coding,” notes Derek Snaidauf, Deloitte Advisory principal in advanced analytics, Deloitte Transactions and Business Analytics LLP. “But early alerts and risk ranking of anomalous events can offer internal investigators the ability to react quickly and help head-off product quality and safety issues as early as possible.”

Snaidauf adds that well-run product safety and quality management analytics can also help improve compliance programs, customer satisfaction and brand perceptions while reducing quality management costs:

“It's tough to deny their utility in powering performance improvements.”

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