Dan Harris wrote an article about product safety (How to Reduce Your Foreign Manufactured Product Liability Risks) that will, hopefully, open the eyes of many people to the risks they are exposed to. I thought it particularly interesting because he went through typical questions asked of importers that resold unsafe products: To convince recalcitrant clients of the need for product liability protection for the products they are having made overseas, I sometimes send them the following … [Read more...]
How To Choose The Right Packaging To Protect Your Products? [Podcast]
In This Episode… We take a close look at why packaging plays a key role in protecting your products during transit. Packaging materials, supply chain risks, and packaging reliability testing are all scrutinized to give you a good introduction to this topic and help you choose the right packaging for your needs. You'll see why considering packaging and developing the right inner and outer packaging for your needs should be done during the product development process and should neither be … [Read more...]
Supply Chain Risk Management: No, Toyota Doesn’t Always Do Just-In-Time
I ran into a very interesting article from Bloomberg entitled How Toyota Steered Clear of the Chip Shortage Mess. Nearly all automakers announced that they would have to cut their production numbers due to a serious shortage of semiconductors. This was made even worse by a recent fire in a Japanese manufacturing plant. One might think Toyota would be seriously impacted by the general market situation and by one of their suppliers being temporarily unable to produce. Apparently, Toyota … [Read more...]
Have You Revised your Supply Chain Risk Analysis?
Last year, I wrote about the Business Continuity Plan (BCP). More and more companies request their suppliers to prepare a BCP, as a structured approach to performing a supply chain risk analysis to get prepared for the risks they are exposed to. If you haven’t revised your BCP in 2020 and 2021, you have probably been caught off guard by recent events. But the question everyone is wondering is, ‘can we even forecast what is going to happen?’ … [Read more...]
How To Perform In-Depth Due Diligence On Your Supplier [Podcast]
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...]