Let’s say you have been developing a new product. The plan, of course, is to bring it to market as soon as possible. Your company’s strategy is to ‘produce it in China’. How long will such a custom product development in China actually take?
Probably longer than you’d guess, as we are going to see.
Planning your product development
From a project management point of view, you would need to plan for all the steps to take — selecting a Chinese partner, getting tools made, starting up production, and getting the goods shipped out.
The first time you attempt to create a project plan that encompasses these elements, it can be difficult to get it accurate. In fact, it is very common to vastly underestimate the length of time it takes for each of the tasks.
Your initial plan might look like this (31 weeks):
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And in the end, it might look like this (64 weeks):
(Click on the image to enlarge.)
NOTE: the number I use a naturally very rough averages. They would apply to an electro-mechanical product of average complexity, to be made in a Chinese factory that has never made that exact product before.
Some typical mismatches between estimates and reality
Let’s explore a couple of typical mismatches between estimates and reality — sourcing and tooling.
1) During the partner selection phase, you might think you will be able to find a suitable manufacturing partner simply by looking up a few companies on Alibaba, exchanging a few emails, getting some quotes, and sending an order to the supplier who is more responsive and has a good price for your product.
In reality, finding the right supplier takes time and should be done methodically, by following a step by step process. The partner selection phase is often estimated to take around 4 to 5 weeks but in reality, it is more like 6-8 weeks.
2) Another big mismatch in planning is the actual time the non-recurring engineering takes.
The supplier will often state 35 days to produce tools. However, this does not take into consideration the design for manufacture (DFM) analysis, tool designs with you signing off the design, or a mold-flow analysis — all these steps, which you should probably not skip, take place before tooling starts.
A 35-day period is also often stated for ‘first off’ samples from the tool; in reality, the ‘first off’ sample inevitably requires some modification to the tool in order to bring the part into the specification. All this takes time and is outside the quoted 35 day processing time. A more realist time from start to finish for tooling is more like 70+ days.
So remember when you are planning, the actual timescale for custom product development in China is a least twice as long, and in some cases up to four times as long as the initially estimated timescales for your project plan…
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