Product Qualification & Recalls: Mechanical Engineering Consulting

How can Exponent's multidisciplinary consulting team support product qualification and recall decisions?

Product safety and quality are important considerations for consumers, product manufacturers, regulators, and lawmakers in the United States and abroad. The drive toward safer products is reflected in the regulatory and litigation landscape, as well as in the increasing civil penalties levied by U.S. entities and regulatory bodies around the globe.

Exponent's multidisciplinary teams address many aspects of product safety, including design, risk, manufacturing, and consumer-use issues. Our experience and analysis can equip clients with the information they need to make appropriate business decisions.

Exponent provides testing and consulting services to evaluate a wide variety of common failure modes in products known to have triggered recalls as well as critical analysis of proposed products from a safety perspective. 

Our teams perform scientific research, analyze accidents, and evaluate product recalls for almost every industry. We leverage a database of more than 300 million incidents and accident records to quantify the performance of very specific products and accident-related injuries to place our clients' recalls in a broader context and help them understand if their issue is an anomaly or a statistically relevant issue. 

Our engineers assess the root cause of warranty claims, evaluate potential problems related to particular products, and provide data-driven insights that allow manufacturers to make informed decisions on continuing production, potential design changes, and identifying corrective measures to mitigate future risks and help ensure consumer safety.  

How does our broad scope of experience working within multiple industries benefit you?

We help clients navigate regulatory responses and have presented findings in front of major U.S. regulatory bodies, including the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as well as public communications strategies. Our approach is focused on the robustness of the product related to particular safety concerns, so that, if and when a failure occurs, it occurs safely. 

Exponent's China offices address specific quality and design issues for U.S. and international clients with manufacturing facilities in Asia and the Pacific Rim.