In this page, we would like to summarize
for you our observations on how and why your China manufacturing orders may
face issue of quality incompliance, shipping delays, cost variation, management
inconsistency, the applies, in most cases, also to all low-cost sourcing and
buying project, even if it is purely a market pick
Before moving forward and for the time being,
let’s forget about culture difference, the real situation could be:
Factory you see
and visit could be a processes gathering, machineries and workshop are owned by
different individuals who "pretended" to be of the same company,
the
person you are dealing with could be a independent sales rep on his own or from
a trading company;
Factory of such
or even if a real company usually run by the GM's personal rather than a basic
management processes, let along documents and procedures;
Product and
materials specification, drawings, operation procedures, quality standards are generally
missing for all of these factories or exists in an isolated state or fail to be
implemented strictly. ISO certificate is something you can get cheaply in days;
Materials are
sometimes off the specification;
Quality inspections at various key steps are missing, quite often it is only found when a failure is caused;
Some
manufacturing processes needs to be outsourced due to lack of self-possessed
machinery, short of capacity or cost reasons, this definitely increase the
difficulty in stick to time schedule and adds quality uncertainty;
Temporary workers
or even technicians are hired during the peak season, they are thrown into the
operation without any training or incubation;
No clear planning
or fail to stick to that causes materials, labor or capacity shortage;
Crazier thing is
his up and down stream partners in the SCM if generally of the same management capacity
as he does, you know what will happen;
Guess you can imagine what else could happen.
The bloody truth is that this has nothing to do with culture or communication. These are the fundamentals of your headaches and their cost-competitiveness.
Now the choice is yours, live with it, change it or walk away.
Below slides is a summary of above opinion in PDF format.
