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...]
Don’t Let a Chinese Supplier Circumvent You: 5 Tips
Some risks and frustrations never go away... One of them is Chinese suppliers circumventing their customers, or selling to their customer's competitors, all the while using the product knowledge they gained... from their customers. Over the weekend, I stumbled upon a good old HBR article entitled When Your Contract Manufacturer Becomes Your Competitor. It came out in 2006, but the same trends are still at work! … [Read more...]
The Biggest Manufacturing Risk These Days: Short Term Focus
Back in February (which seems to be a long time ago), I wrote that that number 1 manufacturing risk for importers was quality issues and the number 2 was delivery delays. (I also mentioned "lower demand on your market" because we were "getting to the end of a long cycle of economic expansion". That proved to be number 1 risk, actually!) But, let's get back to the suppliers' quality & delivery performance and why short term focus has continued to impact them and their reliability... … [Read more...]
How To Reduce The Risks Of Substandard Components In Your Productions
One of the major fears of importers is to notice substandard components when they receive a batch from China. But how to reduce the risks of receiving them from your suppliers? … [Read more...]