Thanks to low labor cost and to endless possibilities of customizing products a lot of the world’s production has today been centered to China and other Asian countries, but placing your production in a country far away comes with risks. While the lower production costs make sure your products stay competitive on the increasingly competitive market, risks concerning quality arise from lack of control and supervision when producing far away.

So how can you minimize your risk with production in Asia? There is not a single solution, but we will in this article describe the basics on how we do it ourselves.

I hope you will enjoy this information and that it can help your quality control to be smooth, in case you need further advice contact us and we will help!

Product idea

When you first get a product idea in your head and contact us we will try and see if it would be easy to produce by imagining the parts of the product and how they would be manufactured. A product with many and complicated parts is of course more likely to have more quality errors than a simple product with fewer parts. If we can we will use standard parts which does not only save money, but will also make sure that the part is already working since it is already utilized in other products found on the market.

Choosing factory

While choosing suppliers you have previously successfully worked with is often a good start for maintaining good quality it is not alone sufficient to do so.

Once we have your product idea we will start with looking at suitable factories for the production. The three best ways to evaluate a supplier is to check products that the factory has previously made and making sure that they really made it, often factories buy samples from other factories or stores and claim they produced it themselves, check where the factories current products are sold, in General Northern Europe or Japan is a quality sign while for example Middle East and even United States can be a sign of lower quality demands, lastly we will also advice to visit the factory before the order, even if all seem fine from far away you can never know for sure until you actually visit.

Note: when it comes to certification of factories in China such as ISO-9000 they are often fake or issued very loosely and we will not value them as high as we would when working with a western supplier.

Producing samples

We always produce 3 sets of samples in the factory prior to any production, these samples are then sent to our office in Hong Kong where they are evaluated and we make sure that they are all identical matches of each other. After the samples has been compared and evaluated one of the samples will be sent back to the factory (clearly marked) which can be used as a template for the production, one is kept by us for reference during our in factory quality control and one is sent for approval to our customer. This process makes sure that everyone knows what quality is approved and expected.

Sometimes the products need to be tested and sometimes this can be done during the sample phase (sometimes its the final production that needs to be tested). The testing of the product is decided by the client prior to the production and advised by us. Common test are CE, ROHS and EN71. While testing for some products such as batteries and wooden items often are mandatory some tests can be requested by the customer just to make sure the product fulfill their own quality expectations.

Documentation

Before we place an order with a factory we always sign a bilingual (English and Chinese) purchase order agreement clearly stating our responsibilities towards the factory and their responsibilities towards us. The purchase order is always accompanied by a product specification and a purchase order and they will together clearly state the quantity of the order the materials and quality of the product and packaging as-well as production time.

These documentations will serve as valuable support during the production and can also provide legal mandate in court whenever needed.

Production

We talk regular to the factory to see that the production schedule is followed. We also visit the factory to make sure key points are according to specification and deadline. This could be after the raw material comes in, after the molding or the printing.

We know that day to day contact with the factory is vital to make sure the production goes smoothly and you will get to know problems (trust me there is always problems) quickly and solve it directly and avoid surprises.

Before shipment inspection

A great product will fail if the logo is upside down, a screw is not in place or a part is inside out. It is very costly and time consuming to change a finished product so we make sure it is put together correctly from the beginning. We provide many types of quality control for our customers, but the most important from a quality perspective is always the pre-shipment inspection which is made just before the goods leave the factory. We insist to always do our quality control at the factory for multiple reasons, the most important is checking the products with your own eyes so you know what you get.

During our quality control we will control vital parts of the product and we will make sure that the the chosen AQL (Accepted quality level) is fulfilled. Normally we will do a 100% inspection of all of our orders, but if the production is really large and this is not possible we will instead use AQL according to the rules of ISO-testing.

Note on factory in house QC: the in factories in-house quality control normally remove some of the defective products, but it can never be trusted in full and we almost always find errors in the production, even after the in house QC.

 Payment and Transport

After the quality control is finished our quality report with pictures from the factory and production will be made and sent to our customers and the goods are shipped to our customers.