Earlier this year, the toy industry knew it had a big problem: tough new product-safety rules barreling down the regulatory turnpike, and most toy businesses too small to manage compliance with those rules well.
So, like the band of heroes in Pixar’s animated film “Toy Story,” the businesses united to answer a common challenge.
Their solution was an industry-led certification program to establish consistent product-quality rules via auditable assessments of product design, manufacture, and testing. Launched in February, the program is intended to forestall looming new government regulations and revive toymakers’ battered reputations after the tainted-product scandals of 2007.
Walter
“The industry had a very good idea that regulation was coming its way,” says Jim Walter, chief regulatory officer for global product integrity at Mattel, the world’s largest toy company. “We wanted to make sure we had a very comprehensive and logical way to address those regulations.”
The threat of new regulation came as no surprise. 2007 was the year that Thomas the Tank cars and Barbie accoutrements turned up with worrisome amounts of lead in their paints, and magnets began falling off Polly Pocket and other toys, posing a risk of intestinal blockage. Manufacturers, including Mattel, R2C Corp., and others recalled millions of Chinese-made toys (roughly four-fifths of U.S. toys come from China). Just last week, Mattel agreed to pay $2.3 million in civil fines related to 2007’s fiasco.
After the predictable publicity nightmare, Congress passed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act in 2008. The law established stringent rules for permissible levels of lead paint and certain types of plastic chemicals, and instructed the Consumer Product Safety Commission to establish its own new toy-related regulations. It also demanded that companies prove their products are safe through exhaustive product testing and that certifications proving toys passed such testing be available to distributors and retailers.
Coordinated Solutions
Rather than leave each toymaker and seller to fend for itself, toy businesses decided on a coordinated approach. The 550-member Toy Industry Association enlisted the American National Standards Institute and other key stakeholders to create the Toy Safety Certification Program, or TSCP. Ultimately, there will be a TSCP certification mark on all toys that pass the program’s muster, all paid for by a $2-$3 per-toy certification posting fee.
PROGRAM REQUIREMENTS
The following excerpt from the Toy Industry’s Toy Safety Certification Program explains some of what is required for certification:
Product Hazard Analysis and/or Risk Assessment Documentation
Design hazard analysis and/or risk assessment shall be performed for any products
to be certified. This safety assessment should include a review of key elements of
ISO/IEC Guide 50 and/or 51, Handbook for Manufacturing Safer Consumer Products (U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, July 2006) or other similar standards. The design hazard analysis/risk assessment shall be the responsibility of the
applicant, who may perform the analysis/assessment in-house (if qualified), or
delegate this function to a qualified third party.
Applicants shall ensure that personnel performing the design hazard analysis/risk
assessment have appropriate background and experience to complete the analysis,
and operate independently from the design function. It is expected that an
authorized representative of the applicant will evaluate the adequacy of the hazard
analysis/risk assessment process.
Rationale
It is recognized that an effective design hazard analysis and/or risk assessment,
with appropriate follow-up action, will help remove reasonably foreseeable
hazards prior to manufacture and distribution, help protect children and help
reduce the need for recalls. Applicants should accomplish the
analysis/assessment as early in the design /manufacturing process as possible.
Documentation and Attestation
Applicants shall document the output of the hazard analysis or risk assessment
process that occurred for each unique product. A unique product is one that
differs from established toys in design, material or construction such that this
difference could influence safety. The hazard analysis or risk assessment may
refer to previous similar designs where appropriate.
The results of this analysis will not be submitted as part of the application
process. However, attestation by an individual authorized by the applicant that
the design hazard analysis and/or risk assessment has been accomplished shall
be provided to the certification body at the time of application as identified in
Section 6.4.1. Appropriate attestation shall list the standards and processes
used to complete the analysis/assessment.
Process Control Audits
The purpose of this Process Control Audit system is to evaluate a factory’s potential
to consistently produce products free of nonconformities by assessing how well its
internal systems are planned and designed to be technically sound. Assurance that
the products are produced in such a controlled and monitored fashion reduces the
risk of manufacturing nonconformities and consequently reduces the need for post-
production testing or periodic retesting.
Audit Process
Factory process assessments will be conducted by an independent audit
body accredited by an accreditor that is signatory to the IAF MLA for
management systems in accordance with ISO/IEC 17021. An audit checklist
will be drafted and proposed by the Technical Committee and approved by
the Oversight Council.
The auditor will rate each item on the Factory Audit Checklist using one of the
following ratings:
Acceptable: Fully meets the requirement.
Conditionally Acceptable – Requires Improvement: Isolated non-conformance(s) exist that are not evident of a systemic failure and are unlikely to create a product safety defect.
Unacceptable: Non-conformances exist that demonstrate a systemic failure or that are likely to create a product safety defect.
The auditor will document observations made that led to each rating
determination in sufficient detail to permit the factory to both correct any
deficiencies as well as maintain acceptable performance.
The factory is responsible for developing and implementing a Corrective
Action Plan (CAP) to address root causes of any finding (rating of Requires
Improvement or Unacceptable). The CAP should be documented in
accordance with the template in Appendix 5 and should identify proposed
implementation dates for each CAP item. Follow-up visits will be conducted
as necessary to assess successful completion of the CAP and may result in a
revised (improved) rating. Corrective action deadlines will be set by the audit
company in conjunction with the factory based on the severity of the
nonconformities and the amount of time required to implement and verify the
effectiveness of the correction. Failure to meet the agreed CAP will result in
either a reduction of or failure to advance to a higher Tier level.
Disputes between the factory and the process audit company regarding
interpretation of the process control requirements may be referred to the
TSCP Executive Director or designee for resolution. In the interim, the
decision of the audit company will stand. Disputes regarding administration of
the program will also be referred to the TSCP Executive Director or designee.
Unannounced periodic re-audits will be conducted:
Approximately once a year by factory auditors
Randomly by certification bodies as part of their internal quality control
process
In the event of reasonably substantiated complaints and/or the need for
remediation
At the discretion of the TSCP Executive Director, such as for a factory that
produced nonconforming product subject to a recall.
Source
Toy Industry’s Toy Safety Certification Program (April 28, 2008).
Arthur Kazianis, head of global quality assurance for Hasbro, says the TSCP will help companies comply with the 2008 law, but goes well beyond it. “The [law] focuses on regulatory issues, where the TSCP takes that into account and applies effective design-hazard analysis, good quality-management systems in the factory, and comprehensive testing on the finished product to complement the act’s requirements,” he says.
Borelli
Elizabeth Borrelli, executive director of the TSCP for the Toy Industry Association, puts it more simply: “You can’t ‘test’ safety into a toy.”
The TSCP is starting with a system to collect product certifications and make them accessible to distributors, retailers, and regulators on demand. Developing that system required collaboration among stakeholders including toymakers, retailers, testing labs, certification bodies, factory auditors, and others, Borrelli says. The questions they had to answer were deceptively complex: Is a blue train different than a red one? And if a company can prove that red paint is on 200 toys, does it have to test the paint on all of them?
Then there’s the technology tying it together. The Toy Industry Association enlisted Enablon, which has spent a decade making software to help corporations track social and environmental issues.
Philippe Tesler, CEO of Enablon North America, says the toy industry following a path similar to that of the Global e-Sustainability Initiative and the Supplier Ethical Data Exchange in London. These organizations represent hundreds of corporations aiming to reduce business risk and enhance corporate responsibility on an industry-wide basis, rather than going it alone. The toy industry’s task is even harder, Tesler says, because rather than focusing simply on factories, it must certify individual products.
“It really makes sense to band together to work some of these issues as an industry, because the complexity is too much for a single company to deal with,” he says.
Cheryl Possenti, a partner specializing in toy safety and product liability with the law firm Goldberg Segalla in Buffalo, N.Y., agrees.
“My sense is that certainly they’re competitors, but they all want input from one another as to what seems to make the most sense in terms of how to comply with the law,” Possenti says. “It’s mutually beneficial to share ideas on that.”
Indeed, although toy kingpins Hasbro and Mattel both already have internal systems in place that employ most TSCP features—the TSCP was even based largely on their efforts—both see value in taking the approach industry-wide. Walter says the TSCP has made Mattel take a “very, very hard look at all of our policies and procedures, to ensure not only full compliance with the TSCP, but also that we have a margin of error there.”
And, he adds, the TSCP is forcing some in the industry to boost their investment in product quality, which levels the playing field among competitors and benefits consumers along the way.
Benefits vs. Costs
Not all toy businesses, however, believe the playing field needs leveling. Take the example of Maple Landmark Inc., a toy shop in Middlebury, Vt., that employs 35 people making specialty wooden toys locally. Mike Rainville, Maple Landmark’s president, says 884 of his company’s toys fall under Congress’s 2008 consumer-protection law, and it may cost hundreds of dollars to certify each—and since his production costs typically exceed that of big competitors’ imports, and he sells fewer units, he can’t easily defray the TSCP certification safety costs.
“The thing that bothers us so much is that this is a problem brought to light by the mistakes of importers,” Rainville says.
No longer a member of the TIA, which he says focuses on big players importing products from China, Rainville says Maple Landmark will soon have its own library of certificates; for now, the company will just put a piece of paper in each shipment, he says.
Borrelli counters that other small toymakers view the TSCP as a “virtual quality-assurance department” they couldn’t otherwise afford. Daniel Grossman, CEO of Wild Planet Entertainment, says his company already complies with the provisions of the 2008 law, making additional costs “not very burdensome.”
“We may achieve some cost savings if this program enables us to standardize testing,” Grossman says. “There is certainly the benefit that those not compliant with this law will now either have to get on the level playing field, or leave the game.”
McHugh
Retailers, on the other hand, stand to gain uniformly, says Kathleen McHugh, president of the American Specialty Toy Retailing Association. If the TSCP can give retailers assurance that the toy products meet Congress’s new standards, “then the value to retailers is peace of mind they have not had since the recalls of 2007,” she says.
Hasbro’s Kazianis says he believes the entire toy industry can gain from the collaboration.
“You won’t damage your brand because of things that could happen during design, manufacturing, or the retailing of the product. That’s all tremendously beneficial to the company itself and, overall, puts the toy industry in a better position in the future,” he says. “And we protect the consumer, and that’s the biggest benefit by far.”
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