Imagine that you decide to hire a third party QC company to check your products before the factory ships them. The QC company reports lots of defects on your products, and need corrective actions to fix them before shipping.
What can you do to remedy these issues?
You may think like normal importers that`s your inspectors` duty to work closely with factory staff to find out corrective actions and fix these problems at the source. But generally this isn`t the case. In fact, this belief that a QC inspectors role extends beyond simply finding and reporting problems.
The reality is that third party quality inspectors rarely work with Chinese factory staff to find out corrective actions and fix the issues. So what`s stopping them? ability? or cost issue? but why do importers continue to rely on QC inspections to manage the quality of their shipments, despite this limitation? Let`s jump into why QC inspectors do not typically offer remedies to quality control problems and discover how they really benefit importers.
Why QC inspection doesn`t directly solve your quality problems
Product inspection isn`t product manufacturing, you can`t offload all your manufacturing concerns to a QC company and expect them to solve all of the problems at your supplier`s workshop, Professional QC inspectors are also limited in both their authority and scope of knowledge. Whether you`ve a hired a third party QC company , full-time inspector or you`re travelling from abroad to conduct inspection yourself, inspection has its limitations.
Product inspectors aren`t qualified in root cause analysis, they aren`t Quality Analyst in factory. they usually lack the expertise needed to pinpoint the exact problem and advise the best solution. That are outside the capabilities of a typical product inspector.
Even if the experienced inspector was able to find the root cause for problems and advise the solution, do you think the factory will rework the shipment 100% accordingly?
Quality inspectors can`t tell factory staff what to do
We all know that working with a factory to actually address any problems found during inspection requires cooperation from factory management and staff. And corrective actions, including product rework or any replacement, usually comes at a cost to the factory owner. The factory often needs to use more product parts & materials, as well as occupying production equipment and workers in the process. Depending on how valued you are as a customer, it can be difficult to get your Chinese supplier to comply.
But it`s typically much less likely that your supplier will comply with a similar request from outside inspection staff. Third-party and other outside QC inspectors have no real authority to dictate how a factory operates their internal process. These staff are often limited to only visiting certain areas in a factory and reporting on certain aspects of production, It`s also common for factory staff to prohibit certain on-site tests you may have asked your inspectors to perform. though you have created a checklist for your inspectors.
A factory`s own internal QC inspectors can and sometimes do dictate changes on the production line. They`re normally separate from ordinary line workers and report to a manager that has the authority to halt production. But most importers don`t rely on these staff for inspection, due to a usual lack of transparency and the risk of biased and unreliable reporting to the importer.