The first ethical issue to be presented in the simulation was “The Case of Fair Warning.” In this case, the Quality Control Manager was waiting on the lab results for new products that were already released. The quality control lab fell behind two weeks with the testing that needed to be done on the new products which lead to the release of the new products without the actual test results. It turns out that there were traces of contaminants in all of the samples that the lab received; this indicated that there was a problem with the patented ingredient that was included in the product. The researchers determined that the contamination was considerably below the current FDA standards but did not meet the requirements of the company’s stricter standards.
The ethical issue that needed to be addressed was “whether to warn and what information to provide consumers about the contaminant” (Screen 4, 2007). I used the Baird Method: 4+1 Decision Process to provide the decision making steps needed to decide on the best solution for the contamination issue. After the issue was clearly stated, it was then time to decide who the actual stakeholders were and the level of impact they would suffer as I made my decision. The stakeholders were the Chief Executive Officer, Site Operations Director, Quality Control Manager, the Public Relations Director and the consumers. The problem was then analyzed using the Rights/Responsibilities and Results lens which show who would be affected and how they would be affected by any decision made.
Step 3a of the Baird Method: 4+1 Decision Process calls for identifying the duties of the company to its consumers. These duties include; “the duty to ensure the ingredient labels provide accurate and meaningful information, the duty to refund or replace defective products, and the duty to warn consumers of known potential dangers” (Screens 8-10, 2007). According to the simulator, the most ethical option in this case would be to “disseminate...