Why Early QC Involvement Is Important?

Successfully sourcing your products from China implies being careful and diligent about each step of the manufacturing process. QC (Quality Control) is one important step that responsible importers implement at some stages of their production, usually before shipment because it is believed to be the most cost-efficient stage for quality control.

Pre-shipment inspections are best sellers in the 3rd party QC industry; they are performed when production is finished (or almost finished). But without earlier preparation and follow-up with the factory, these inspections might present a few risks that you need to consider:

1. Costly Rework:

Identifying defects late during the production cycle involves higher costs of rework and repair. Unpacking all the finished goods, sorting the defective products, reworking or changing them and repacking them again is costly.

2. Negative impact on Time-to-Market:

If problems are found, repairing them often delays the shipment of your goods, which might affect your time to market.

3. Compromising on Quality:

Because of time or cost pressure, and also because of lack of support from the factories, many buyers end up agreeing for the goods to be shipped even when they don’t meet their initial quality expectations.

4. Damaging your relationship with the supplier:

Creating a healthy and long-term partnership with your supplier is a must to succeed in your products sourcing in China and to consistently get the level of Quality that you want.  Often, issues found during a pre-shipment inspection might lead to arguments and frustrations from both sides (the importer and the supplier).

“No one mentioned this before”, “If you want this quality it will cost more”, “This is unavoidable” are examples of what you can hear from your supplier, because clear requirements and specifications on the products were not agreed before production and proper follow up with your production was not done at early stages.