Product Testing Standards, Requirements, and Record-Keeping

Introduction

Advantus Corp has established a Reasonable Testing Program for three primary reasons:

1.      Federal or State Regulations
2.      Customer Requirements
3.      Children’s Product

The goal of product testing is to have passing test results in hand prior to the ship date of every item that requires testing:

• New products must be tested prior to shipment.
• Product testing must be maintained on a periodic schedule for the life cycle of the product.
• Once a product has been placed on closeout status, it should be tested if the product has key account placement.
• All children’s products must be tested by a CPSC accepted third-party laboratory.

Exceptions to Advantus’ general testing process:

Product testing for items manufactured internationally is completed prior to shipment of those products to the U.S.: An exception to this rule stands in regards to domestically shipped items of “low risk”/”low concern” (example: glitter or sequins from known factories), where the customer does not strictly require product testing completed prior to item shipment. In these instances, the factory does not need to wait for passing item test results in order to ship the item to the U.S. if the product manager believes that doing so may put our product shipping deadlines at risk.

Common Product Testing Terms

• Composite testing is where more than one paint or surface coating, or more than one component part, are combined and the combination is tested for the level of the target chemical. This can reduce the number of tests required or the number of products needed to obtain a sample large enough to test.
• Gap Testing–  Some of our customers accept product test results on forms that are not theirs, as well as test results on other customers’ forms.  We must proactively understand our customers’ gap testing policies