Protecting consumers and ensuring product and service quality

Although market surveillance may appear to be the preserve of governments for ensuring compliance with technical regulations, many manufacturing and service organizations develop market surveillance systems for their own purposes. However, standards and product regulation play a key role in promoting good practice and can help extend the common ground between countries and regions when it comes to product quality and conformity.

The marketplace can be a jungle where the laws of supply and demand do not necessarily operate in the best interests of suppliers and consumers – especially in unregulated markets. The need for market surveillance is more important than ever in protecting consumer safety and ensuring the quality of products and services. Many manufacturers and service providers use market surveillance to control how their products behave in the market.

For example, the distribution chain – particularly in perishable  goods such as foodstuffs – can have a significant effect on quality. Sampling products on the market is an important form of market surveillance, and can provide a different perspective on how well a quality system is working in the factory. Sampling competitive products is equally essential for monitoring developments by competitors.

For consumer associations, market surveillance is an important tool to alert consumers to safety, health and other risks, recommend “ best buys ”, enable comparative testing among like products, and monitor the growing number of Websites that offer products and services. Those offering travel and restaurant recommendations, for example, should also fall under the scope of market surveillance. In this article we discuss the role of standards and standardization in supporting market surveillance and look at regulatory directives and best-practice voluntary guidelines in the European Union and Brazil, based on our familiarity with those markets.

In the European Union Market Surveillance in the European Union is the individual responsibility of the member states, but each country follows Regulation (EC) No 765/2008, which sets out the requirements for accreditation and market surveillance relating to the marketing of products. Safety of products in the non-food consumer products sector is harmonized in the EU through the General Product Safety Directive (2001/95/EC), the New Approach Directives and other sectorspecific regulations and directives.

These legal references are deeply relevant to market surveillance and make extensive use of ISO and IEC standards as tools for providing presumption of conformity with legal requirements or, in other cases, as preferred tools for assessing product safety. The General Product Safety Directive also provides essential tools supporting identification, information, withdrawal and recall of unsafe products. It establishes not only the basis for the roles of European and national authorities, but also the obligation for manufacturers, importers and distributors to ensure the safety of products on the market. The EU’s RAPEX (Rapid Alert Recall System) system, applicable to non-food and non-pharmaceutical consumer products in the EU, makes one of the best-known contributions to product safety and is accessible to any interested party.

Standards and technical regulations
Standardization is a widely used tool in support of market surveillance. However, incorrect or outdated references to standards are too often used as an easy (and cheap) way to identify non compliant products during market surveillance campaigns. Nevertheless, standardization plays a very important role in supporting technical regulations, as well as market surveillance, through :
• Product standards, establishing the requirements to be fulfilled
• Standards for test methods, sampling, vocabularies, etc.
• Standards for conformity assessment

Conformity assessment
The requirements established in conformity assessment standards provide an essential reference for testing and assessing compliance to regulations in force in a market. Therefore, it is necessary for market surveillance and customs authorities to maintain close liaisons with the national standard bodies and with the latest updates of standards relevant to legislation.

Reference: ISO focus