Determining product safety characteristics

Product safety characteristics affect product design and/or production process design.

The issue of product safety is related to special characteristics and product safety characteristics are very important for the design and production of products. These important requirements are determined during the product and production design process. For example, material hardness and tensile stress are very important safety characteristics for the durability of brake parts. These characteristics come from product design specifications, product drawing, and design FMEA.

In addition, the hardness of the material is also affected by the heat treatment conditions in production, production parameters such as temperature and time. Thus, production parameters such as temperature and time of heat treatment are the subject of product safety and they are also special characteristics related to safety for brake parts. Another example is the tightening torque amount for seat manufacturing and seat assembly process. Screw tightening torque is also safety characteristics and can be affected by the wrong set up of production or not calibration of torque meter, both of the causes may come from the production process.

Critical characteristics of the product and production process; it is defined by legal regulations, security, and significant important critical characteristics.  All these characteristics have different symbols according to customer-specific requirements as (R/S, CC, SC)

All these characteristics, come from legal regulations, product drawings, product specifications, and production parameters that affect the health of production operators and the durability of the product. 

According to the IATF 16949 standard, Product Safety is relating to the design and manufacturing of products to ensure they do not represent harm or hazard to customers. As you know customers are regulations, end-users (driver and passenger), OEM plants, the other manufacturing plants, and production operators.  The customer should not be at risk of affecting the safety of the product. These special characteristics related to product safety is determined by regulation, product drawing, and which have to be monitored and controlled at the production point affecting the safety of the product.

All these requirements must be transferred via product drawing, material specification, DFMEA, PFMEA, Control Plan, etc to the entire supply chain, and the entire supply chain must comply with the product and production-specific characteristics for product safety.

For more information, please read the following article:

• Ensuring product safety according to IATF 16949  https://advisera.com/16949academy/blog/2017/09/20/ensuring-product-safety-according-to-iatf-16949/