New Product Performance Evaluation

Choosing what performance criteria to test to is a crucial marketing decision, and is complicated by the choices of written and unwritten industry standards, product certification choices and regulatory interpretation. Contracting an outside lab can be enormously expensive, and often the decision of what to test is based on an outsider's perspective.

Water Think Tank expertise in this area comes from three decades on the front lines in business management, but made especially valuable from direct participation in dozens of industrial and regulatory groups that set these test standards. Some of the agencies we actively advise include NSF International, American Water Works Association (AWWA), the US EPA, ASTM Committee D19 on Water, and the Water Quality Association.

But meeting short term test standards alone will not protect your company from product failures. The actual end-use environment and water quality conditions will determine if a product or technology will fail. Discovering failures when the product is already in customer's hands can be costly and even sink a new product.

WTT excels at not only testing and rating a product or system on its performance, but also at evaluating the marketplace and regulatory implications when designing the test. We work with clients to define, then replicate actual in-use environments and consider pertinent regulatory and health standards. This ensures that the product or system will perform as needed, within the full range of intended applications and environments.

We will perform the tests as well, drawing form a group of field test personnel trained to install, operate, monitor products in the field or lab, and most important to react to results. Personnel are assigned on a per project basis according to direct experience with the technologies evaluated.

WTT provides in-depth, objective product performance evaluations that thoroughly screen for product weak points before high expenses or negative market reactions occur.

Performance Evaluation / Rating Services:

• Protocol development
• Laboratory bench-top, test-station, and field testing
• Identification and liaison services with specialty labs, including university and agency labs
• Manufacturing QA / QC and ± variability testing
• Regulation pass-fail tests
• Installation, usability and durability tests
• Fail-default analysis, design options