My personal experience agrees with John. I prefer to work with Engineering and reporting someplace in Engineering;-- it makes my job easier when compliance is "designed" right from the very beginning rather than be responsible later to get it past agencies. At that point, it suddenly became my "problem" when it did not comply! When I told management that they should fix things before we submitted the product formally, the response was "let's see what the agency will do...." This left me frustrated and embarrassed my ego.
If you catch things in the very beginning, engineering is usually amenable to changing things. Later, it is very difficult and, obviously, much more costly. [email protected] ----- Original Message ----- From: John Woodgate Sent: Wednesday, November 28, 2001 2:48 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Quality Assurance and Product Approvals I read in !emc-pstc that Mark Werlwas <[email protected]> wrote (in <[email protected]>) about 'Quality Assurance and Product Approvals', on Wed, 28 Nov 2001: > On the aspect of the "where to put Product Safety/Compliance in the > organization" discussion bears mentioning on the forum. In general I > advocate that the Product Safety/Compliance department be separate from > Engineering, Sales, and Operations. The Safety/Compliance group should > avoid > conflicts of interest (real or apparent) that may arise in the above > mentioned groups. Even the occasional appearance of a conflicting interest > can undermine the credibility of the Safety/Compliance team. But this militates strongly against 'designing-in compliance', and is very liable to create a 'them and us' conflict between Design Engineering and Compliance. The *maintenance* of compliance in manufacture is a Quality function. -- Regards, John Woodgate, OOO - Own Opinions Only. http://www.jmwa.demon.co.uk After swimming across the Hellespont, I felt like a Hero. ------------------------------------------- This message is from the IEEE EMC Society Product Safety Technical Committee emc-pstc discussion list. Visit our web site at: http://www.ewh.ieee.org/soc/emcs/pstc/ To cancel your subscription, send mail to: [email protected] with the single line: unsubscribe emc-pstc For help, send mail to the list administrators: Michael Garretson: [email protected] Dave Heald [email protected] For policy questions, send mail to: Richard Nute: [email protected] Jim Bacher: [email protected] All emc-pstc postings are archived and searchable on the web at: No longer online until our new server is brought online and the old messages are imported into the new server.
