The central air-conditioning system in our building is often set to freezing. On such days, my laptop comes to the rescue with its built-in hand warmer. I would have dismissed the overheating until the Sony battery recall finally hit Fujitsu, which however reported that it had received no related complaints so far.

The recalls by Fujitsu and Hitachi early October brought the tally to about 7.5 million Sony-made batteries. Sony, which had been selling these batteries for two years, can face losses of about $300 million.

The company has recently been in the news for recalls rather frequently. About this time last year, some digital camera and camcorder vendors issued service advisories. Faulty CCDs manufactured by Sony were behind certain types of image-capture issues where cameras either captured no images or captured them distorted and with severe color casts.

Sony told a Japanese publication last October that the company had changed settings on a wire-bonding system in a bid to increase productivity. The result was a weaker joint. Scores of digital camera and camcorder models from Sony were affected. And that's not counting products from other vendors, including Canon, Fujifilm, Nikon, Ricoh and Konica Minolta, which earlier this year sold its camera business to Sony.

And last year, the company also recalled about 3.5 million of its slim-line PlayStation 2 AC adapters because of a fire hazard.

But recalls are not limited to Sony. In March this year, Philips recalled 11,800 plasma flat-panel TV sets with the Ambilight feature. The notice by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) asked users to turn off the Ambilight and stated that the recall was due to potential arcing by capacitors.

Recalls are not limited to equipment either. We know of Pentium recalls by Intel. More recently, Xilinx issued a recall of Spartan-3, Spartan-3E and Spartan-3L FPGAs made between early September 2005 and late April 2006. Xilinx said specific lots of wire-bonded PBGA packages sourced from multiple suppliers could have a manufacturing package defect that puts reliability at risk.

Recalls are frequent enough for companies to build products around them. For example, Risk and Safety Management Alert System is a web-based subscription service that provides notification, distribution and management of product alerts and recalls for healthcare organizations. You can also subscribe to one of CPSC's free mailing lists at www.cpsc.gov.

Another example of business around recalls is product-recall insurance available from most major insurance companies as a specialty product. And if you're recalling products five times in six years, like Dell did from 2000 to 2005, then this could be just the safety net you want.

What really saddens me is that engineering is often to blame. You may cite requirement to roll products to unreasonable deadlines not set by the engineering department. You may say that you weren't allowed enough time for firmware debug. Or you may say that pressure to decrease costs compels you to find alternative less-reliable manufacturing supplies. Sure, go ahead and blame the marketing people.

But at the end of the day, it is your product that failed, that caused an injury or simply didn't perform when it was needed. And can you prevent the next product recall with appropriate planning and communication not just within your team but with other involved departments?

Perhaps that's what Sony has in mind with the appointment of one of its presidents to oversee product quality and safety. More companies need to acknowledge the problem and begin arresting it.

Email the Editor

Back to top