Life cycle management

Introduction
TUV Rheinland’s Life Cycle Management service accompanies your product throughout its whole lifetime. Our service offers virtual testing, provision of relevant international approvals and certificates, usability and quality testing, evaluation of suppliers as well as supervision of shipment procedures.

As an integrated part of this service, our Brand Protection System is a holistic approach to fight product piracy and was developed to secure your brand’s products throughout your whole supply chain up to the end-consumer.

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Life Cycle Management
The Life Cycle Management approach assists the development of your products already from the very beginning on. You develop an idea, we support you with virtual testing in combination with life cycle simulation system. In the design phase, our experts give advice to ensure optimal results, identify potential failures and provide all necessary safety, usability and functionality tests through simulated aging in our laboratories. Our engineers additionally check whether your products are conform to international quality and safety standards.

As an accredited certification body, we carry out risk and quality assessments for your manufacturers and suppliers to examine compliance to international security, quality or social accountability standards.

Moreover, our assessors evaluate security management systems and later help optimizing internal processes. Our position as a third party, independent and neutral, enables us to supervise production as well as shipment procedures and loading of goods. We might conduct spot checks to measure the quality of products.

Our Brand Protection System is an integrated part of the Life Cycle Management Services and secures your supply chain from the manufacturer up to the end-consumer.
Once the product reaches the end of its life cycle, the recycler receives instructions for the recycling process from our database. All information will be stored and documented at our Internet platform TUVdotCOM which authorized users are able to access.

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Design

Conformity Assessment

Sourcing

Production

Shipment

Customs

Purchasing

Consumer

Recycling

Design: Virtual testing supports a product already in the design phase. Usability, durability, recycling (e.g. quantification of harmful substances) and Brand Protection features have to be determined before production to achieve optimal results.

Conformity Assessment: Our experts carry out safety and quality testing of products locally in order to check compliance to international standards. Through simulated aging in our laboratories, we provide all necessary safety, usability and functionality certificates and recognize potential failures. These certificates are compliant to the new European directive 1999/44/EC that stipulates a minimum warranty of 24 months on consumer goods.

Sourcing: As an accredited certification body, we carry out risk and quality assessments as well as second party audits for your manufacturers and suppliers to examine conformity with international quality and social accountability standards. While enterprises tend to become more and more globally involved, it is essential to affirm the trust of the customers. In addition, our experienced experts qualify your workforce with the latest technical know-how in our training seminars.

Production: We supervise the production processes of your manufacturers, check quality of goods, optimize internal processes and evaluate security management systems. In addition, the Brand Protection Service offers an overall quality assurance of the supply chain against counterfeited goods.

Shipment: Before shipment, authenticity of goods can be verified via our Brand Protection System. We conduct a final quality check and supervise loading of products.

Customs: Without particular product knowledge and technical devices, customs officials can easily distinguish between counterfeited and real products using our Brand Protection System.

Purchasing: The brand owner has access to our Brand Protection System’s Track and Trace functionality 24 hours a day and 365 days a year. Via this functionality upon request you gain the ability to automatically receive reports about the status of your products. These reports include information about actions, locations and timeframes so that you can track a specific product throughout your whole supply chain.

Consumer: The trust of a consumer will be affirmed due to our Brand Protection System as authenticity of all products can easily be checked via Internet at our online portal. The gained information about the consumer can later be used for marketing goals.

Recycling: Once a product reaches the end of its lifecycle, the recycler can receive instructions for the recycling process from our database. All information will be stored at TUVdotCOM, our online platform for customers, and might be used as documented evidence of conformity for recycling processes. Authorized users can have permanent access to all information.

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Brand Protection Service
The manufacturing and pharmaceutical industry, the supermarket around the corner, the consumer - all of them have something in common: They are facing an increasing problem of counterfeited spare parts, drugs and every day commodities. The Counterfeiting Intelligence Bureau, a department of the International Chamber of Commerce, believes that worldwide
5 – 7% of traded goods are counterfeit.

As a global leader in product safety we bear responsibility for the needs of our customers. With the Brand Protection Service within the Life Cycle Management we react to the looming threat of product piracy.

In cooperation with the Fraunhofer Institute of System Technology we developed a secure method that is used to create unique verification codes: these codes will be attached to the product and can later be verified at our highly secure web platform TUVdotCOM by authorized parties throughout the whole supply chain as well as end-consumers or legal authorities such as customs officials.

The track and trace feature of our Brand Protection System documents all relevant incidents that occur during your product’s way through the supply chain and later reports them to you upon request. You will be able to determine who of your suppliers and retailers is authorized to execute an action in a certain timeframe. All of these actions will be monitored by our database and can only be accessed by your authorized administrators.

Combined with all other features of the Life Cycle Management Service, our holistic approach is a comprehensive and cost-efficient solution to the threats your brand and customers are facing.