We learnt that in China more than anywhere else, when discussing about manufacturing or product development, quality related issue is always a big concern.
After so many years managing productions and product development under other local factories roof, we are able to make a short list of the reason why quality fail:
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- Profit: top management of factories like to squeeze cost at maximum to increase margin sometimes by swapping raw materials.
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- Turn over in human ressources: The worker who was trained last month about one specific product moved to another factory from yesterday to today for a better salary this month and the lack of procedure standardization make that new worker is not really aware of quality standard required by customer. We have seen high fluctuation in quality particularly when quality manager of factories were jumping to another factory and was replaced by a new one which was not briefed enough.
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- Communication: most of time, senior overseas buyer will be managed by a young 20 years old fresh graduated girl with an english background but being labelled as sales engineer. Most of time the “sales engineer” will not understand well the technical terms bringing communication being distorsed and informations being not transmitted properly, provoking mistake and quality/conformities issues.
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- Ressources partionning: we have seen several time in the past a phenomena of partionning of white collar and blue collar making that sales people (who consider themselves as white collar) will never go on the production line (because it means they would mix with blue collar = workers low class) to check the production which they are responsible for. In result, they most of time discover issue in the same time that customer.
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- Salary payment terms: some factory pay their employees per pieces being processed and not per hour or per day, resulting in making workers sometimes going too fast to increase their salary. In result, production are made so fast that products are not manufactured properly (glue, paint doesn’t have time to dry properly sometimes)
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- Anticipation and Responsibility: one of the biggest issue related to quality take source from lack of anticipation and responsibility handling.
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- Lack of researches and simulation during engineering: many engineering, design and product development companies don’t perform simulation to verify and validate their design before entering into mass production. They will tell you they have tested their design, but if you investigate deeper you may discover their testing methode is just inappropriate or not reliable enough to predict product reaction to its real use.
QUALITY CONTROL AT EACH STEP
We structured our organization and procedures to manage and optimize quality output for your product being developped and manufactured with us. Our Quality Engineering background taught us that quality management is before all a question of process implementation. You can consider quality assurance and quality management like an inspection activity if you like, but we rather consider it as a whole package: quality control + audit.
If you make some reasearches, you will find out that 80% of product failure are not actually due to manufacturing causes but quite often due to design. We then consider quality assurance not only on a manufacturing standpoint but also and above all on design and engineering standpoint
PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT & ENGINEERING
Design verifciation and validation
There are probaly plenty of engineers in the country of your manufacturer which you may find at low cost. Yet, very few make a great job when it comes to design and optimize a product development activities.
For example, visiting some local manufacturers or design firms you may find some line of “engineers” working on computer for part modeling and 3D CAD design. Yet, a CAD designer is not a mechanical engineer. A proper mechanical engineer will know how to calculate stress, force, constraints, aging, and how to simulate a model to verify a design before moving forward on prototyping.
CAD designers are only drawers and can not be assimilated with mechanical engineers. Many “industrial designers” know how to draw some parts and products under CAD software, but many don’t know how to verify and validate a design using simulation. Too many still are using gut feeling and pseudo physical testing to hope everything will goes well.
We take the western approach to verify and validate design before mass production and even before the prototyping stage because know that at this stage, the cost of modifying a design is relatively cheap.
Design Documentation
When we design and develop a product, we establish a documentation with a log and a versioning. This allow us to have a full track record of what has been done and when. Many companies don’t do this in China. Yet local company have a very high turnover and you can never predict when the engineer working on your project is going to leave the engineering company, leaving your project in a state where you can not move on anymore and fast speed because a potential new engineer will not like to take back a project being undocumented.
Having a track record of what has been done and what has not been done in environment full of unpredictability and in constant move is an absolute necessity. We have seen many companies starting their design with chinese engineerig firm who gave up their project during the engineering and turning to us to catch back on the project. Without a proper documentation in place it is impossible to restart on a project in full confidence.
MANUFACTURING
Unlikely many companies who handle only quality control and inspection at the end of the production line, we handle quality management at the different stages of the sourcing, procurement and manufacturing process.
It give us full control on the production to avoid quality issue, late delivery, recall and complaint from the market. Our team has an extensive background in product inspection and quality control operation.
Be confident with our expertise in supply chain management and quality management. We have full capability to handle your production and make sure it get exempt from defectives.