Imagine your product is involved in a serious incident, potentially life-threatening. Not only do you have some huge internal corrective measures to take, but the eyes of the world are now on you.
How do you get your organization back on track, running like it should, AND…
How can you patch up the reputational damage after attracting the kind of attention no manufacturer wants?
Last January Boeing, Alaska Airlines, and not to mention hundreds of flight passengers found themselves in a nightmare scenario, and at least for Boeing that nightmare continues. In fact, it may have just begun.
A Boeing 737 MAX 9 was taking off from Portland when a piece of the plane’s fuselage blew off.
First and foremost, nobody was seriously hurt. But Boeing is now under the federal regulators’ microscope, the subject of a Justice Department criminal investigation, and possibly the defendant in a mounting class action lawsuit by numerous passengers who were on board that day. Ouch.
What happened? Maybe this was a deeply-ingrained design flaw, or some defective part from an obscure source. Nope. The four retention bolts for the piece in question were simply not there. An easily avoidable folly that may now cost them BIG TIME.
And it gets worse…
This incident actually marks a violation on Boeing’s part of a probationary agreement with the DOJ from 2021 to keep a tighter yoke on regulatory compliance, a deal that was only days from expiring when the blowout occurred, stemming from two fatal crashes also attributed to faulty equipment on MAX aircraft.
But it seems the real failure was in Boeing’s internal verification systems and procedures. If things seem to be running smooth, it’s easy to become complacent and even negligent in maintaining the most basic elements of your shop. And these are the ones that can really come back to bite you if you don’t stay on top of them. Just ask Boeing.
So how can you avoid such pitfalls?
These faults in your system must be CAUGHT EARLY, before disaster strikes.
- At the building phase – When creating your company infrastructure, employ your expertise, and do your homework on what you don’t know inside and out to build in necessary redundancies, checks and balances, and constant innovation and improvement of protocols, especially on the simple but critical components.
- Regular self-inspection – Test and assess your process and correct as necessary. It’s better for you to find these problems than an external evaluator, which brings us to…
- External inspections – If issues, especially safety-related ones, are found at this stage, you should now be in crisis mode. It’s advisable to pull out all the stops, maybe even suspending your operation, to rectify the problems, because…
The next step is that a disaster befalls you and your business.
The repairs to your products and services, particularly when safety issues arise, are essential; but there’s another indispensable angle to consider…
This level of damage to your reputation can be devastating beyond recovery.
The concept of “in-industry secrets” is disappearing in the modern age, where privacy is hard to come by in any context. The bigger your organization gets, the more your every move and interaction is a matter of public scrutiny.
So, if you’ve been on the wrong end of a public relations debacle, it’s absolutely life-or-death that you not only rectify the problem, but do what you can to make the correction as public as the problem.
I can’t stress this enough, hopefully you never reach this stage.
But if you do, transparency and candid reporting on your remedial measures can go a long way in rebuilding your brand as a trustworthy and reliable provider of solid product.
Unsure of how your current process measures up? Maybe you have some safety and compliance questions, or even want to revamp your entire playbook.
I’ve worked with hundreds of companies to keep them out of the regulators’ firing line, and I can do the same for you!
Get in touch and let’s go over your situation.
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