Quality checks need reality check
"There was much blah-blah-blah but nothing concrete," said Zofia Urbanowska Bak, registration specialist for Johnson & Johnson, about last week's meeting.
Business leaders had been promised Friday, April 21 that prices and procedures for getting the "B mark" for product safety would be clarified. Deputy Foreign Minister Andrzej Bryt, who hosted the meeting of nearly 60 business leaders and four of the 16 certification testing chiefs, said price lists for tests would be printed by Wednesday, April 26.
That was news to the on-the-ground testing chiefs who certify shampoos, Bak found out Monday. They had no intention of printing price lists.
"They said prices were only for internal use," Bak told the WBJ. "They said, 'If you ask us about a price, we can tell you.'"
Ten Johnson & Johnson shampoos have gone through the certification process and Bak is working on three others. Prices have varied, with no apparent rationale.
"Pricing is not clear"
"The pricing is not clear," Bak said. "They use some co-efficients that are very subjective. And it is up to them what coefficient they will use." She said officials at the Polish Testing and Certification Center (PCBC) told her prices for testing imported shampoos are nearly double the cost of testing domestic ones, reinforcing fears of many foreign investors that their products could be held hostage to protect domestic products.
Without the luxury of decades of debate and legislative evolution, Poland's leaders face the dilemma of protecting consumers without unduly hampering business development of new products.
Now, with virtually no product liability laws or regulations as this market economy enjoys explosive growth, there has been pressure from each government for mechanisms to protect consumers o and to certify all products sold here as safe.
No foreign government would question the merits of that goal. How it is reached o and whether the certification process is spawning a spate of damaging and unintended business barriers o is the big question.
The fine print is missing on an array of key issues: Costs, timetable and criteria for product analysis; transparency of procedures that precludes back-door deals; technically appropriate tests for cutting-edge products. Will the certification tests actually promote product safety or put up so many bureaucratic and financial barriers that consumers and the Polish economy end up losers in the race to build a new market here?
After delays last winter, when it was clear rules were not in place, the government appears intent on going ahead with its May 1 deadline for the certification process.
Officials announced last Friday that full certification did not have to be completed until year's end. As long as companies have registered their products by May 1, as required before they seek the "B mark" certificate, their products would not be yanked off store shelves.
Nor would goods be blocked at the border because they lacked the "B mark," officials said. Computerland's Dorota Malinowska saw that assurance as one tangible result of Friday's meeting.
Braced for problems
But Malinowska was still braced for problems.
Her company, Computerland's franchisee for Poland, designs and installs customized computer networks for business and governmental clients. It has no retail stores, but puts together computerization plans for customers and then buys computers and components from producers or their Polish distributors.
Malinowska is scrambling to determine whether all Computerland's suppliers have or plan to get "B mark" certificates for products that have been used here for years.
"I am concerned about whether the people at PCBC understand clearly the distribution channels for computers in Poland. You have producers, distributors and dealers and, in the end, there is the customer," Malinowska said. "I really worry if they are able to test and issue certificates in a very short time. This might be a problem for us, as a company which likes to be a leader in computerizing Poland."
This is a problem not just for Western computer companies but for the fast-growing Polish computer firms like Optimus, which also designs computer setups. Each working part, in each customized system, could require a "B mark" under some interpretations of the rules.
The same dilemma could face a less well-known computer powerhouse, JTT, which did $122 million in sales last year and imports nearly all of its RAMs, chips, hard drives, cables and networking boxes.
While some high-tech multinational giants have had few problems o including Hewlett Packard, which has certified everything from laser printers to scanners, according to product manager Cezary Makulec o others are not so lucky.
This includes 3-M Corp., which is having trouble getting a safety seal for overhead projectors that have been sold in Poland by the dozen since 1993. Some of 3-M's cables, insulation and power-industry products are also experiencing delays.
A testing bottleneck
"We submitted a number of products more than six months ago. There is a bottleneck in the testing institutions," said Witold Jozwiak of 3-M.
The lack of clear-cut prices and procedures poses a dire threat to some smaller businesses, said Walter Golebiewski, general director of Polex-General Motors, North American Vehicles, a parts supplier for U.S.-made vehicles here with 100 employees at three sites.
If, as it appears, new cars imported here are certified, but the spare parts are not, Golebiewski could have to apply separately for each part.
"Financially impossible"
"That's like 65,000 different parts and that's physically and financially impossible," said Golebiewski, who returned to Poland a year ago after two decades in the United States, much of it in the auto business.
He already has had an unpleasant encounter with tests over a brake regulator he imported from Seattle, which he said is used not just in the United States but "in most industrial countries like France, Sweden, Japan and even Russia. We spent millions of zlotys on this and a year of meetings before being told, 'No, this product is not good for the Polish market.'"
Golebiewski said process and rhetoric are as much about preserving high-wage engineering jobs as about product safety.
"If we don't have prices, we should stop the process or put it on hold until they can explain to everyone what they want and how this system will work," he said.
Golebiewski and others learned at the Friday meeting that Poland has apparently agreed to exempt at least some products that have been certified for safety in Europe from Polish tests. That would not be the case for U.S. products which may met equally rigorous Underwriting Laboratory safety tests.
"So GM-Opel (with headquarters in Germany) is in a perfect situation here, but I'm in trouble because I get spare parts (for GM cars) from the United States," Golebiewski said.
Peter Richards of Renaissance Technology Group said Friday's meeting didn't solve all that much.
Without Poland deciding whether to adopt the European Community standards or to shape its own safety standards, the 16 "PCBC centers are allowed to make their own interpretations," Richards said.
"That's bad," he said, partly because testing results can vary from center to center. As a result, "we're all in limbo."
Business leaders had been promised Friday, April 21 that prices and procedures for getting the "B mark" for product safety would be clarified. Deputy Foreign Minister Andrzej Bryt, who hosted the meeting of nearly 60 business leaders and four of the 16 certification testing chiefs, said price lists for tests would be printed by Wednesday, April 26.
That was news to the on-the-ground testing chiefs who certify shampoos, Bak found out Monday. They had no intention of printing price lists.
"They said prices were only for internal use," Bak told the WBJ. "They said, 'If you ask us about a price, we can tell you.'"
Ten Johnson & Johnson shampoos have gone through the certification process and Bak is working on three others. Prices have varied, with no apparent rationale.
"Pricing is not clear"
"The pricing is not clear," Bak said. "They use some co-efficients that are very subjective. And it is up to them what coefficient they will use." She said officials at the Polish Testing and Certification Center (PCBC) told her prices for testing imported shampoos are nearly double the cost of testing domestic ones, reinforcing fears of many foreign investors that their products could be held hostage to protect domestic products.
Without the luxury of decades of debate and legislative evolution, Poland's leaders face the dilemma of protecting consumers without unduly hampering business development of new products.
Now, with virtually no product liability laws or regulations as this market economy enjoys explosive growth, there has been pressure from each government for mechanisms to protect consumers o and to certify all products sold here as safe.
No foreign government would question the merits of that goal. How it is reached o and whether the certification process is spawning a spate of damaging and unintended business barriers o is the big question.
The fine print is missing on an array of key issues: Costs, timetable and criteria for product analysis; transparency of procedures that precludes back-door deals; technically appropriate tests for cutting-edge products. Will the certification tests actually promote product safety or put up so many bureaucratic and financial barriers that consumers and the Polish economy end up losers in the race to build a new market here?
After delays last winter, when it was clear rules were not in place, the government appears intent on going ahead with its May 1 deadline for the certification process.
Officials announced last Friday that full certification did not have to be completed until year's end. As long as companies have registered their products by May 1, as required before they seek the "B mark" certificate, their products would not be yanked off store shelves.
Nor would goods be blocked at the border because they lacked the "B mark," officials said. Computerland's Dorota Malinowska saw that assurance as one tangible result of Friday's meeting.
Braced for problems
But Malinowska was still braced for problems.
Her company, Computerland's franchisee for Poland, designs and installs customized computer networks for business and governmental clients. It has no retail stores, but puts together computerization plans for customers and then buys computers and components from producers or their Polish distributors.
Malinowska is scrambling to determine whether all Computerland's suppliers have or plan to get "B mark" certificates for products that have been used here for years.
"I am concerned about whether the people at PCBC understand clearly the distribution channels for computers in Poland. You have producers, distributors and dealers and, in the end, there is the customer," Malinowska said. "I really worry if they are able to test and issue certificates in a very short time. This might be a problem for us, as a company which likes to be a leader in computerizing Poland."
This is a problem not just for Western computer companies but for the fast-growing Polish computer firms like Optimus, which also designs computer setups. Each working part, in each customized system, could require a "B mark" under some interpretations of the rules.
The same dilemma could face a less well-known computer powerhouse, JTT, which did $122 million in sales last year and imports nearly all of its RAMs, chips, hard drives, cables and networking boxes.
While some high-tech multinational giants have had few problems o including Hewlett Packard, which has certified everything from laser printers to scanners, according to product manager Cezary Makulec o others are not so lucky.
This includes 3-M Corp., which is having trouble getting a safety seal for overhead projectors that have been sold in Poland by the dozen since 1993. Some of 3-M's cables, insulation and power-industry products are also experiencing delays.
A testing bottleneck
"We submitted a number of products more than six months ago. There is a bottleneck in the testing institutions," said Witold Jozwiak of 3-M.
The lack of clear-cut prices and procedures poses a dire threat to some smaller businesses, said Walter Golebiewski, general director of Polex-General Motors, North American Vehicles, a parts supplier for U.S.-made vehicles here with 100 employees at three sites.
If, as it appears, new cars imported here are certified, but the spare parts are not, Golebiewski could have to apply separately for each part.
"Financially impossible"
"That's like 65,000 different parts and that's physically and financially impossible," said Golebiewski, who returned to Poland a year ago after two decades in the United States, much of it in the auto business.
He already has had an unpleasant encounter with tests over a brake regulator he imported from Seattle, which he said is used not just in the United States but "in most industrial countries like France, Sweden, Japan and even Russia. We spent millions of zlotys on this and a year of meetings before being told, 'No, this product is not good for the Polish market.'"
Golebiewski said process and rhetoric are as much about preserving high-wage engineering jobs as about product safety.
"If we don't have prices, we should stop the process or put it on hold until they can explain to everyone what they want and how this system will work," he said.
Golebiewski and others learned at the Friday meeting that Poland has apparently agreed to exempt at least some products that have been certified for safety in Europe from Polish tests. That would not be the case for U.S. products which may met equally rigorous Underwriting Laboratory safety tests.
"So GM-Opel (with headquarters in Germany) is in a perfect situation here, but I'm in trouble because I get spare parts (for GM cars) from the United States," Golebiewski said.
Peter Richards of Renaissance Technology Group said Friday's meeting didn't solve all that much.
Without Poland deciding whether to adopt the European Community standards or to shape its own safety standards, the 16 "PCBC centers are allowed to make their own interpretations," Richards said.
"That's bad," he said, partly because testing results can vary from center to center. As a result, "we're all in limbo."
