Over the years, many importers have contacted me after making various mistakes, and, often, the best they can do is start things over with a new supplier, but that means a lot of wasted time, money, and energy! What if you could get years of advice about sourcing from China and developing suppliers once you've started working with them in order to avoid this scenario, but distilled into one eBook? Now you can! A few years ago, I wrote 15 articles that address sourcing from China and … [Read more...]
5 Ways To Have a Chinese Manufacturer Take Responsibility for Quality Issues
Many importers lament that Chinese suppliers don't take any responsibility when quality issues are found after shipment. Ten years ago, I would have confirmed that it happens less than 0.1% of the time. These days, it seems to become more common. … [Read more...]
Supply Chain Management: Quality Inspections’ Role
Do you sometimes feel that your company, your suppliers, and their own suppliers, are on different planets? Does information spread with difficulty through your supply chain? Nothing unique here. It is quite typical if you work with suppliers in China, Vietnam, India, etc. I wrote about this in The Impact of Quality Control Software on Your Supply Chain, on the SynControl blog, and we illustrated it in this infographic: Every step in the supply chain tries to optimize its own … [Read more...]
8 Ways to Prevent Chinese Suppliers from Subcontracting
I wrote before that the vast majority of Chinese manufacturers routinely subcontract some orders. The problem is, they usually do it without disclosing the reality to their customer. Why do they subcontract production to another factory? Sometimes it is a necessity to meet the customer's tight deadlines. And sometimes it is a way to cut costs, by placing production in a cheap workshop that has virtually no control over quality. This can result in a quality disaster (very common), a PR … [Read more...]
5 building blocks for developing good Chinese suppliers
Last week, I was happy to moderate a seminar organized in Shenzhen by the European Chamber. The three speakers, who were kind enough to come and expose the programs they use for developing good Chinese suppliers, represented very diverse organizations: A retailer (Kingfisher, with more than 1,000 stores, mostly in Europe); An industrial organization (Altra Industrial Motion); A high-tech company in the security field (Oberthur). After looking at my notes, I noticed that a supplier … [Read more...]