Putting products that aren’t the best of quality out on the market is the easiest way to ruin your reputation, but it surely isn’t the quickest. Having products recalled because they are defective, don’t do what they’re supposed to or can be dangerous, affecting the health and safety of others, is the absolute quickest way to ruin your rep!

With all the hoopla around Toyota’s massive recall,  it got me thinking about how seriously an organization’s rep can be affected from a product making it to market that isn’t up to par with the quality standards that purchasers expect.

Event though Toyota’s recall was the largest ever in history, with almost 9 million cars being recalled, what will affect  them the most for now and in the foreseeable future is that they put products out into the market that don’t meet their brands reputation — one of quality and reliability.

More than likely Toyota will be able to bounce back from this recall and have already started using every medium available to them in order to get people to forgive and/or forget….and eventually they will.

There are thousands of recalls every year across the world and while a product recall can cause devastating damage to a company’s brand name and profitability regardless of size, industry, location or reputation, a company can be left in ruins if it cannot recover from the fall-out of a product recall.

We’re not in the “what to do after a product recall business” but we do know a lot about preventing them.  Implementing best practices and the solutions to support them will help to improve product quality and safety and reduce the risk of a product recall in the future.

For many small and medium businesses, while a valiant effort may me made to ensure product quality from inception to retirement, without the right solution to manage that process, a lot of hard work and effort can go to waste….and that wasted effort can be disasterous.

So you’ll need something that will help to:

• Manufacture Consistently Higher Quality Products
• Focus on Prevention
• Streamline Compliance
• Reduce Cost of Quality
• Reduce Regulatory and Product Risk

Those 5 things are key to alleviating the risks associated with a product recall. Does anyone have any more thoughts about what an organization can do to prevent a product recall?