Protecting Your Client's Brand
With product safety and regulatory compliance in mind, you should vet each of your suppliers carefully and perhaps through a different lens than you have before. Does the supplier have a compliance department? Is there a senior compliance officer who can explain to you how the compliance process works at each of the suppliers’ factories and at their headquarters? Does the supplier have any quality or product safety certifications? Do they have inspection records and third-party audits to back up what they’re saying? Is a risk assessment done on their products before each one is added to the line? What third-party tests are conducted and how often? How do you obtain the current test report for each product? Do the test reports include photographs specific to the supplier’s products or are they generic reports for similar products made by the same factory? Does the report include all the required tests to comply with U.S. regulations or is the report referring to European standards? All of these are important questions that you or someone in your organization should know the answers to before doing business with any supplier.