Do your new or current suppliers pose a risk to your business? Sometimes the only way to find out if a supplier poses a risk is to perform some deep due diligence on them in order to assess their business health and if they're able to be a stable, reliable supplier for the long-term. Especially in these times where we're dealing with a pandemic, getting a realistic picture of how suppliers are doing is hard without the ability to be on the ground in China. But there are actions you can … [Read more...]
Investigating the Causes of Product Failure and Improving Design
You conduct reliability tests on your new products. You and your suppliers do product inspections and laboratory tests on mass production orders. Your customers probably give you feedback on the issues they find on what you ship to them. You collect many data this way. You set aside samples that don't pass. But do you learn from this? One of the most important activities is the investigation of the causes of product failure when certain samples fail the inspections/tests or fail in the hands of … [Read more...]
The Basics of Quality Management for Buyers [Podcast]
What's the best way to get started with quality management? It makes a lot of sense to work to improve your product quality coming from Chinese suppliers and you don't need to be a large corporation to do this, but this kind of quality management is best when it follows a process. So in this episode of the podcast, we discuss what the quality management process is, and its 3 main parts: quality planning, quality control, and quality improvement. By understanding how to put measures in … [Read more...]
Should You Avoid the Words “Defects” and “Defectives”?
Someone on Linkedin wrote about the distinction between these 2 terms: Defect Defective I actually see a lot of confusion around them. What does the standard say? ISO 2859-1 includes these definitions: Defect: non-fulfilment of an intended usage requirement Nonconformity: non-fulfilment of a specified requirement (Note: In some situations specified requirements coincide with customer usage requirements) Nonconforming item: item with one or more … [Read more...]
An Introduction to Root Cause Analysis (Not Just for Manufacturing)
One of the most frustrating aspects of working with Chinese suppliers is that, for the most part, they don't want to (or cannot) conduct a root cause analysis. Let's say you found a serious issue in one of your productions and you don't want it to come back in the future. You ask for an investigation into that problem. And they come back with very superficial responses that are clearly still far from exposing root causes. Here are very common excuses: "It is due to an issue on the … [Read more...]
Factory Testing Facilities | Vetting Chinese Suppliers (Part 8) [Podcast]
![Factory Testing Facilities | Vetting Chinese Suppliers (Part 8) [Podcast]](https://qualityinspection.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/FactoryTestingFacilitiesVettingChineseSuppliersPart8Podcast-1140x445.jpg)
Why do we look at the factory testing facilities when vetting a Chinese supplier? A great question here is: "How can my supplier know that the product they're manufacturing is good if they're unable to test that they reach my specifications, quality, and safety requirements?" If they have no way of testing or are skipping important tests this is probably a major red flag (unless you're certain that they're sending samples out to a lab to be tested all of the time) as it shows that the … [Read more...]
Using Reliability Engineering for Designing a More Durable Product
Many leading brands have had to address concerns over the impact of their products on the environment. And one of the best responses is "make products that last longer". Here are the responses of two iconic brands: Apple: make iPhones last longer (optimizing battery charges, making display glass very hard, etc.) Patagonia: clothes that are durable and that are timeless (the opposite of 'fast fashion') Over time, customers have the feeling that those brands' products are of high … [Read more...]
Dangers of Amortizing Development Costs in the Production Price
When I offered a model for guiding buyers to choose an ODM vs. OEM vs. CM supplier, I mentioned that OEM suppliers often "subsidize" the cost of developing the new product. Then, the buyer ends up paying the cost of development, but it is "amortized" in the unit cost of the product. I'd like to explain why, in the context of when manufacturing a new product, that can be dangerous for the buyer. … [Read more...]
What Is Compliance Testing? [Podcast]
Why is compliance testing so important for buyers who import products from China? Compliance testing helps assure your product's compliance with your market's product and safety standards. By conducting such testing, you'll be testing whether the product is safe for consumers under normal use, doesn't contain hazardous substances above acceptable levels, and won't be restricted from being imported. Because importers are usually held responsible for any safety problems caused by … [Read more...]
Defining and Enforcing Manufacturing Processes for Better Control
As David Collins from CMC often says, there are 5 key success factors that determine a factory’s performance: Production Planning, Incoming Material, Workforce Training, Process Control and Equipment Maintenance. In this article, I'd like to focus two of these success factors: workforce training and process control. And, more specifically, on the way to evaluate how manufacturing processes were defined and how they are kept in place in daily practice. I am reading the latest edition … [Read more...]
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