The best for less
January 11, 2010 by Thuy
Quality is management, not price
Happy New Year!
Our newsletter #1-2010 is on line and can be downloaded in pdf format here.
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Focus on quality - at the best price of course!
Following on our previous newsletter “5 tips to find a good factory”, we continue to dig into your quality issues. Most Asian suppliers, especially mainland Chinese, promise the best quality product and the cheapest price.
It doesn’t always mean that something must give. Yet we all know there can be stark differences in the quality of finished products from factory A to factory B.
Homework before buying:
1. Trade references
i. Always ask for testimonials or trade references. Phone numbers that you can call and chat with are the best. Emails may be a bit dodgy if not from a known and verifiable third party domain name.
ii. It is perfectly understandable that a company will not want to reveal too many details of its customer portfolio. However a company unwilling to provide any trade reference, regardless of industries or geographies, is a signal to run.
iii. Trade references will confirm whether a factory fits your business in product type, quality, volume and overall organization.
2. Trade samples
If purchasing a standard product always ask for samples. You must expect some suppliers to require payment as they screen off less serious buyers. Accepting to pay for samples is your choice. If purchasing OEM, and unless you are working with a factory that only does high value proprietary OEM, ask for samples of similar but standard products.
i. Always ask for minimum 2 samples, to detect product variations from one to the other.
ii. Never accept excuses such as “the finished product will be much better, this is just a sample”. If a factory doesn’t care enough to send good commercial samples, they will not care about the production either.
3. Factory certification
i. ISO 9001:2008 Encompasses all previous ISO9001 standards
ii. ISO 9001:2008 is a very short read: 14 pages only excluding appendices, applying to the services and manufacturing industries - as a manager this is all you need to read. Think about it: a company management philosophy in 14 pages, diagrams included. If only all management consultants were that concise, how much hot air and trees could be saved!
iii. A certificate is a piece of paper, easy to fake, but we at Asquance are experts at finding out the fakes. We won’t say we’ve seen them all, but we have a good nose.
iv. You can find some very good suppliers without ISO certification: what matters is how the company really works. See below.
v. Product’s quality at factories A and B:
Factory A has no independent quality management. The workers are paid by piece. Management checks on the workers to make sure that not just anything goes. When under pressure, workers will be sloppier. Management is putting pressure on for a reason, and will also be laxer in checking. There is no other check, the product ships unless the production manager stops them. If customers complain, management will try to understand what happens and give instructions to the workers to avoid a repeat. A body of knowledge, usually informal, evolves between manager and workers but managers have no time to check every piece and their own priorities mean that product quality criteria will evolve with urgency or the weather.
Factory B has a quality manager who answers to the CEO. It also has an internal team of quality inspectors reporting to the quality manager who at every major step of the production process check quality and decide if products can move on to the next step. The quality team defines product standards and maintains log books of acceptable quality and each department’s performance. It analyses lapses and document them, traces the root cause and works with management to fix it. The performance of the quality team is assessed separately from that of the production department.
Sure, there are good and bad quality managers. But on average will you prefer to work with factory A or B? We rest our case.
Checks after the contract is signed
1. Know your product
i. Ask for product specifications. As we wrote in an earlier newsletter, your single most important action is to write the tolerated variations to the product’s main aspects: physical and functional.
ii. Ask for 3 reference samples to be sent to you. Check that the reference samples that you receive fall within these specifications, physical and functional. Drill the supplier if you find variations. A bit of effort at this point will save a lot of trouble later.
iii. Sign / otherwise mark each reference sample as approved and assign them as follows:
- One back to the factory
- One for your third party QC company
- One for you
iv. For some characteristics such as colour or texture it may be practical to use samples instead of paper specifications to define tolerance definition. The 3 sets rule will apply for these too.
2. Materials and in process check
i. If convenient and important, check raw materials. This is all the more urgent if different grades of materials with widely different values are available on the market.
ii. In process checking is mostly there to catch problems in production process and semi-finished products before they reach final production. This is very useful when some characteristics cannot be checked on a finished product, or when production process and product are new.
3. Final product checks
i. As mentioned above and in previous newsletters, you must check products for physical and functional aspects.
ii. You will check either full product lot or a sample defined to bring you the required degree of certainty that the full lot is represented by the sample.
- If checking full lot, every reject will be repaired or replaced.
- If checking a sample you are using statistics to decide if the full lot is acceptable. In case of reject the factory must inspect the full lot by itself and resubmit it to your random sampling. This could take time, and if in a rush with easy problems you could do full lot inspection by yourself, so that defects are found and corrected quickly.
- At the end of the day, define the the sampling, escalation and correction method that works best for you.
iii. Make sure the payment method does not expose you, have clauses in your contract for protection against inferior goods, think of norms, etc. We’ve been through these points in previous newsletters. Dig in our archives for more ideas!
Summary:
There is nothing like a bit of preparation and regular checkpoints to make sure that what you see on email is really what you receive.
We are here to help you along the way.