Many companies employ a few inspectors in China and, in parallel, pay third-party quality assurance agencies. It makes a lot of sense but is not always done right.
Usually, the roles are divided as follows.
The in-house QA team:
- May go to factories for a pre-production meeting where potential problems are listed and addressed
- Goes to factories during production
- Check the production status and alerts purchasers/merchandisers of possible delays
- Check processes and/or product quality
- Follow up on corrections if quality issues are found
- Have a presence on site and avoid the “out of sight, out of mind” syndrome so common in China
The third-party inspectors:
- Go to factories after products are completed and packed
- Follow a strict procedure for evaluating product quality
- Issue a pass/fail result
- If severe issues were found and the batch had to be reworked: come for a re-inspection
Therefore the whole approach is different.
In-house QA technicians are coming to help the factories. They find issues and give feedback, and they might come back more often if serious issues were detected. But there is no direct impact on the supplier’s business.
In contrast, third-party inspectors look more like policemen. If they don’t find any problem, the goods can ship and the supplier gets paid. This is often seen as undue power by factories, who naturally resent it. There are many conflicts at this stage.
One additional problem is the lack of calibration. QA technicians and third-party QC inspectors don’t fill out their reports in the same way. At the risk of over-generalizing, QA technicians seldom follow a well-structured approach and it is difficult to compare their findings to those of the QC inspectors.
It means it is difficult to see if the third-party inspectors found the same issues as the QA technicians. It is impossible to see if issues found during production were really fixed or at least minimized after the in-line inspection.
To avoid this issue, here are a few tips:
- Make sure the checkpoints are the same for both teams
- Make sure the list of potential defects is the same for both teams
- Have the QA team observe and/or train the third-party QC guys
- Have QC guys do a few inspections just after the QA team, and compare results
I agree with the tips offered for reconciling differences between in-house QA teams and third-party inspectors.
But why might these two groups work together, other than to transition from using one to another for QC inspection? Why might an importer be BOTH using their own QA team and hiring a TPI?
Their own QA staff can do certain things that third-party inspection teams usually don’t want or can’t do:
– Pushing the factory to do something (e.g. allocating more capacity to finish earlier, or fixing quality issues) since they work for the buyer and they have some formal authority.
– Following up on issues and suggesting ways to fix them. Sometimes QC inspectors have a technical background (and in that case they often can’t write/read English).
Overall I think it’s healthy to have an in-house QA team + third-party inspectors coming at the end of inspections. Don’t you think so?