Manufacturing and Quality Control blog

A reliable courier is important in order to deliver the samples on time so that you can approve or decline the sample and let the supplier know if production can begin. What’s a reasonable cost to ship a product sample from Asia? There are a few factors that affect the shipping cost for product samples, such as origin, destination, number of parcels, weight and dimensions. You’ll probably want to choose the courier that offers you a combination of the most reliable shipping and the lowest price.

Topics: Manufacturing Tips & Advice

You might be surprised by what your independent auditor CAN and CANNOT do regarding scheduling and conducting a service on your behalf. It’s important for you to understand what factors your QC company can’t control so that you can address those with your supplier directly and avoid costly quality issues, shipping delays and other undesirable effects of losing control of production.

Topics: Manufacturing Tips & Advice

How does pollution affect manufacturing in China? How have steps taken by the Chinese government to reduce pollution impacted the cost of manufacturing for importers? An overall increase in costs may be inevitable. But as an importer, it makes sense to support your factory in making these improvements as these can help you avoid supply chain issues and save money over time with increased factory efficiency and a lower defect rate.

Topics: Manufacturing Tips & Advice

Importing a product takes guts. Whether you’re starting your own fledgling company and manufacturing for the first time or working as a purchasing manager in a Fortune 500 company, your success or failure depends on getting a product that meets your requirements shipped on-time. Following these three ways to keep to your production schedule, you can avoid the kinds of delays that cause factories to rush production, at the expense of quality.

Topics: Manufacturing Tips & Advice, production monitoring

A lot of buyers express frustration in getting accurate information from their supplier. Supplier miscommunication can lead to shipping delays, quality problems and a host of other issues. Communication by phone, email or even through a face-to-face meeting at the factory can leave a lot of room for interpretation. Maybe your supplier is unwittingly sending you the wrong message.

Topics: Manufacturing Tips & Advice

No one likes product defects, including your supplier. How can you, as an importer, make sure you're addressing product quality issues directly?

Topics: Manufacturing Tips & Advice

Beijing faced an air quality index of 250, that’s 10 times higher than what the WHO considers “healthy” levels. How has China's pollution come to this?

Topics: Manufacturing Tips & Advice

Here you’ll learn three best practices for sending the samples you’ve approved for production back to the supplier to prevent issues.

Topics: Manufacturing Tips & Advice

When the important variables are controlled within the processes, your chance of getting closer to the “perfect” product will be much higher. We’ve discussed lean manufacturing and the 5S method. Let’s look at a real-life, practical application of a Six Sigma methodology. You’ll learn how one company was able to improve a process and exceed their target goals significantly.

Topics: Manufacturing Tips & Advice

All of your suppliers are probably aware of lean manufacturing but most in developing countries implement few, if any, lean initiatives within their operations. This is one reason why third-party inspection is so important if you are manufacturing. We've discussed the 5S method of improving efficiency. Now let’s talk about lean manufacturing as a broader term.

Topics: Manufacturing Tips & Advice