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Project Infomation
Safe to say the management team at Maclaren is having a terrible week. On Monday its US subsidiary issued a press release announcing a recall of every baby stroller it has sold in the United States in the past decade — which means about one million units. The purpose is to install a cover for the stroller’s hinge mechanism, which is sharp enough to cut through a baby’s fingers should they happen to be in the wrong spot as the stroller is opened.* In fact, this has happened on at least twelve occasions.
If you didn’t get a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach as you read that paragraph, you are not a consumer goods executive — or a parent. Think about all the levels on which it’s your worst nightmare, beyond your obvious concern for the children’s injuries:
- Client : Insight Studio
- Date : 20 Feb, 2018
- Skills : Project Planning
Challenge & Solution
Maclaren surely knows it has much to lose from the publicity, but it did the right thing in the US. It contacted the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s Office of Compliance and asked for its help in conducting a recall under the Fast Track Product Recall Program. That saved the CPSC from conducting a detailed evaluation of the product, and allowed the company to get out in front of the story as it hit the press.
Our Process
As for all the other fronts of the crisis noted above, we don’t know what Maclaren’s management will do. But thanks to Harvard Business Review’s archives, we know what they should do. In 2001, HBR published a case study called “When No News is Good News,” and asked four experts to advise on the issues it raised. It’s the fictional story of, you guessed it, a baby stroller manufacturer deciding what to do after a highly publicized accident involving one of its products. A few nuggets from those experts:
01
Improve sales & operations & production planning
02
Determine the right inventory level
03
Optimize the supply chain for perfect order planning
04
Improve sales & operations & production planning
Result Driven
Crisis management, by definition, is not something a company thinks about often. But when a crisis hits, a company has to do a whole lot of things right. Let’s hope Maclaren is doing them.
(Credit: hbr.org)
(Credit: hbr.org)
