Product Safety Initiatives

Never Make an Unsafe Product: Safety Throughout the Product Lifecycle

Lessons learned from recent product safety problems, notably incidents involving FF-type kerosene heaters, have led to a significant shift in the approach taken to product safety by Panasonic. The Company has started the practice of organizing small study groups to analyze safety issues with the aim of revising and upgrading relevant safety standards. Efforts are being made across Panasonic to ensure the safety of each product made.

Panasonic organizes small study groups to examine safety issues as part of ongoing efforts to entrench a safety-first attitude and to raise awareness of related issues. In fiscal 2007, study groups involving managers with quality-related responsibilities focused on safety-related issues. Other three-person study groups involving managers with responsibilities for technology, manufacturing and quality looked at issues related to the integration of these functions over the entire process from design to production, and specifically at safety assurance methods introduced. Other study groups focused on product safety issues by analyzing the causes of specific problems that occurred with actual products, the response measures taken and the lessons learnt. A total of 47 study groups involving 4,868 people were organized at domestic sites.

The end of life for a product is the time when it no longer functions properly. To date, product design has tended to focus mainly on how to make items that will not fail. Based on the view that all products will reach an end-of-life situation at some point, the approach is shifting to emphasize from the design stage onward how to ensure safety when a product either fails or otherwise undergoes recycling or disposal.

"What sorts of risks are associated with a product?" Panasonic tackles this question by conducting analyses using scientific methods to identify risks from multiple perspectives. Efforts are then made to reduce or eliminate those risks identified.

After risk analysis of product designs based on end-of-life assumptions, in the final stage, products are subjected to trials to test ways in which they could finally fail. Any product whose safety cannot be guaranteed at this stage does not make it to market. In this way, Panasonic tries to ensure that no unsafe product is ever made.

Panasonic has developed scientific evaluation techniques such as accelerated degradation testing to study the durability of materials. In collaboration with materials suppliers, Panasonic gathers this information into a database. These data and other market-based information received from service representatives are incorporated periodically into the Matsushita Electric Industrial Safety Standards (MEISS) to ensure that such standards are comprehensive. In particular, efforts are underway to upgrade standards relating to key safety-related aspects such as long-term usage, inflammability and measures to prevent toppling.