The Miami-Dade County Product Control Approval System was established with its main goal to allow new and innovated ideas to be developed into useful, practical, lasting and safe products.

The Product Control Division has a 15-member staff, dedicated solely to the review and issuance of approvals. Our authority comes from the Florida Building Code, under which the requirement for approval is limited to those components which protect the envelop of the building from being breached, and to roofing systems.

Products such shutters, windows, doors, pre-fabricated buildings, truss plates and the like, require approval through the issuance a Notice of Acceptance (NOA) from the Product Control Division, prior to their us in construction.

Even though the Building Code does not mandate Product Control Approval for products such as fences, A/C stands, pre-cast items, railings, plumbing fixtures, awnings concrete reinforcement, wood connectors and others, the Product Control Division extends the approval services to manufacturers of these products wishing to obtain NOA’s.

The Product Control Division is a link between two very distinct industries, manufacturing and construction, and provides oversight of this interaction to minimize the probabilities of Code violations.

Our system is recognized at both, the national and international level. Our NOA’s have traveled, just to name a few, to Hawaii, Japan, South America and the Caribbean. The uniqueness of our system is that we provide a complete package ranging from the quality control inspection of testing, the quality control inspection of the product fabrication, and to the final installation. We firmly believe in the quality assurance inspection approach, since this is what really provides the needed services to our citizens.

When Hurricane Andrew tore apart South Florida, it exposed more than the interiors of thousands of homes and businesses. The storm also ripped the cover off of one of Florida's most serious statewide problems and exposed it for all to see. One of the problems was Miami-Dade’s antiquated system of nationally recognized approvals. Andrew was Florida's wake-up call. It was clearly time to begin to make Miami-Dade County far more resistant to destruction from natural disasters such as Andrew. The manner in which so many neighborhoods had simply blown to pieces drew attention to the Product Approval system. Subsequent investigation quickly uncovered a pattern of widespread construction product violations, which led to catastrophic structural failures. Miami-Dade County in 1994 performed an overhaul of the entire approval system, which currently is accepted in other counties.