It has been said that there is a price to pay for working in a given industry: the intimate knowledge of its dark sides.

I have already written about the perverse effects of social compliance audits and about the dangerous games of some testing laboratories. Now I want to write about the dark practices of some quality inspections agencies.

Just like in a factory, reliability depends mostly on day-to-day decisions taken by middle managers. In good inspection firms, managers always have to take the reliable option–even if it costs more and even if the client is small. In some other agencies, it is not the case.

Let’s study a few examples to see what kinds of tradeoffs are common.

Example 1:

A client books a 1-man-day inspection of garments in Xiamen on 8 June. No garment inspector is available on 8 June, but we can easily send an inspector specializing in hard goods. We can send a garment inspector on 7 June or on 9 June. The supplier tells us timing is tight.

What a not-so-good inspection firm will do:

Send the hard goods inspector. It seems to be the convenient choice for everybody. But he might miss some problems.

What a good one is supposed to do:

Send an email to the client (if possible 2 working days before) and ask him to wait until 9 June. If the client insists: respond that the only option is 7 June.

Example 2:

A client books a 1-man-day inspection of electronics in Ningbo on 8 June. No electronics inspector is available, except for a freelance inspector that was never tested. A qualified inspector can be sent on 9 June, but the client says timing is tight.

What a not-so-good inspection firm will do:

Send the untested freelancer. Again, it is the convenient solution.

What a good one is supposed to do:

Send the untested freelancer on 8 June, together with another tested inspector (who does not know the product, but who can check the behavior of the untested guy). It costs double, but it is the price of reliability.

Example 3:

A supervisor receives a report at 11pm on a Tuesday. The client (in Europe) asks for the result urgently, because the forwarder just advanced the closing date. But the report is rather complex, and the supervisor feels sleepy.

What a not-so-good inspection firm will do:

The supervisor quickly reviews the information from the inspector, to see if the format is fine, and sends it to the client.

What a good one is supposed to do:

The supervisor only sends a quick summary of the main problems, and writes to the client “This is not the official report, and you are strongly advised to wait until tomorrow”. He also quickly scans the report to see if some info is obviously missing (to ask the inspector if needed).

(Note: a good QC firm usually asks a few other QC firms if they have available & qualified inspectors. For simplicity, I disregarded this fact in the first 2 examples.)