How to Evaluate the Safety of a Product

Regardless of a company’s industry or specialty, it’s always imperative to ensure the safety of any product before it gets into the hands of customers. Even for products that don’t seem inherently dangerous, there should be a proper evaluation of the product from a safety perspective. But how can businesses make sure they are doing enough to ensure product safety? Let’s take a closer look at some of the methods and practices that can guarantee safe products. 

Put a Safety Management Team in Place 

Ensuring the safety of all products is usually much easier with a proper safety management team. This doesn’t have to be a full-time set of employees who are focused solely on safety if your business isn’t big enough to warrant that. However, there should be employees who have this responsibility. Keep in mind that safety management is separate from quality control, there should be some distinction between these two parts of the company. 

Understand or Create Standards 

There should always be safety standards in place for every product. In some cases, there will be regulatory or industry-wide standards. If this is the case, those safety standards need to be understood by members of the safety management team. If not, it’s up to the business itself to create its own set of standards for each individual product. Those standards can then be used to measure and confirm the safety of every product. 

Perform Tests and Inspections 

Once there are safety standards in place, the best way to ensure product safety is to perform regular tests and inspections based on those standards. Just remember that there are various tests and inspections that may be performed. It may be necessary to inspect the appearance of a product, its working condition, and even the packaging for product safety reasons. 

Audit Suppliers 

It’s important to recognize that product safety doesn’t just refer to the end product. Suppliers who provide the raw materials also need to be inspected and vetted. After all, the quality of a product and its safety are only as good as the materials used to create it. Businesses need to be able to trust the quality of the raw materials that they’re using and not have any reason to believe that the quality of the raw materials will impact product safety. 

Document Everything 

Like most aspects of a business, maintaining safe products requires documentation. The procedures, tests, and inspections that go into ensuring safe products should all be documented and recorded. That way, there is evidence of the steps taken to ensure product safety. If a problem is discovered at some point, maintaining a record of safety procedures will make it easier to discover the problem and how best to address it. 

Raise the Bar 

Ultimately, the best way to ensure the safest products is to continue raising the bar for safety. Even if there are minimum standards in place, don’t be afraid to go above and beyond them. Perform frequent audits and seek outside advice on how to further improve product safety. The businesses that excel in this area are the ones that know product safety is a never-ending challenge and always approach it that way. 

Don’t Forget Employee Safety 

Obviously, it’s important to emphasize product safety, but it can be equally important to make employee safety a priority. That’s why we advise businesses in all industries to consider the safety management software from EHS Insight. Our system puts every aspect of employee safety on a single platform, streamlining the entire process to make safety easier to manage and create a safer workplace.