He estado pasando recientemente mucho tiempo en las compañías de la responsabilidad tengo cuando ellos outsource asegurar la integridad de su cadena de fuente invirtiendo en un proceso sólido del control de calidad, y éste dieron lugar recientemente a un escritor editorial de Wall Street Journal me enviaron un email en cuanto a mis comentarios sobre el siguiente:

With this time being the most critical, the logical steps that firms take should include: evaluating supplier capabilities, capacity, price, quality, pricing terms, value add services, etc., and all of these should be considered as part of any final decision. Additionally to this, firms SHOULD be making visits to any finalists and negotiating on site, asking for production samples, running smaller test order, and taking other measures to ensure that the supplier is living up to their promises. Following the successful identification of a supplier, and negotiations, production runs get underway and inspections take place to ensure the product meets specifications and that failure rates are at acceptable levels. If there is a problem, the buyer will have someone who can work through the issues and make the necessary adjustments..

These are the steps that they have taken in the United States in house when setting up their own supplier network there, and it should be expected that the same process would be followed (with more caution) when doing this in China right? After all, with all those news stories about bad products coming from china in the newspapers and shared over coffee at trade shows, one would think that companies would be more cautious right?

Wrong.

All too often, and the recent headlines are proof of this, low and mid-level manufacturers do not take one or many of the steps… For them, their market advantage is on price, and they look for short cuts… they look to save money… they look to cut out middle men of any sort… and do not recognize that by cutting corners on resources, materials, and processes they are essentially adding what can amount to a catastrophic amount of risk into the system.

The choice to move to China is a commercial decision that is made at various levels of management, and it is the role of these managers to ensure that the right supplier is chosen, that the supply chain produces a product no different than it would in their own factory, and that there are the systems and people in place to ensure that should anything go wrong, corrections can be made. Making spot checks, investigating supply lines, monitoring production samples, packing containers in house, performing multiple tests, etc are all views as expenses rather than investments, and as such many will choose to allow their supplier to “get the job done”. Short term, the company saves money, but what these decision makers have failed to understand is that long term they risk everything.

If nothing else, the recent cases show that one bad container can endanger not only one’s brand, but the very consumers who they have built trust with.

This really is a topic that will permeate the global supply chain as it has moved from a commercial issue to a political one. My goal in posting this is not to out any one company, but to highlight that more focus needs to be placed on how companies assess the risks and then take the appropriate steps. The companies that have ended up in the news saved money short term, but what is important to understand is that they not only outsourced their products, they outsourced their brand management, to their Chinese suppliers.

This is a post that will continue…