When you’re a foreign manufacturing company sourcing your parts in China, you’ll be able to slash a considerable portion off of your operating costs. The only problem is that you cannot keep a keen eye on what is going on throughout the entire manufacturing process. This can affect your company’s quality assurance program considerably because you may receive a poorly made product. However, despite the fact that the firm which creates product parts for you is thousands of miles away from you, there is a method for maintaining a good quality assurance program.

Here is a step by step plan:

Background checks for starters. Before you even place an initial order, you need to be a hundred and ten percent confident with your supplier. This may mean that you have to go to China in order to inspect their factory since there are some “companies” which are nothing more than two people in an office and all of the products are subcontracted. The company you are considering must be able to give you verifyable references too.

Know how much they can produce. If you want to build a long and lasting working relationship with any Chinese company, you need to know from the get go exactly how many units per item a factory can produce. And make sure that their maximum capacity does not compromise their respective quality systems. You can always ask a quality assurance or quality control agency to do the necessary evaluations if you cannot do it personally.

Evaluate small companies appropriately. If you’re opting to have a QC/QA agency do the factory audits for you, then they may slightly be biased towards large manufacturers because of the fact that they have written procedures and their organizations are composed of multiple layers. However, smaller companies are actually better picks if you have smaller orders. In this case, you may need to make factory audits for small manufacturers in order for you to really get the real scoop.

Setting payment terms. Once you have paid a hundred percent, then you lose all of your bargaining chips. You may think that these companies will continue to woo you because they want to handle your succeeding orders but don’t rely on this notion. As a rule of thumb, your deposits should be limited to just thirty percent. The remainder of the account must only be settled when the products have been shipped and passed final inspection. Having a contract written by a lawyer that specializes in Chinese law is also another way to protect your company from those very expensive scams, but everythng in the contract needs to be verified before final payment is mde

Anthony Roberts works for a manufacturing company for 10 years. He shares the best insights about CNC Machining China.