1. Select the right suppliers for your need
Because so much can go wrong, the vetting process is crucial when you're choosing a factory. Here are some
important questions to ask:
■What kind of experience do you have in this industry?
  Who are the clients you're currently working for?
   What is the turnaround time to produce my product?
   What are your minimum order requirements?
■Can you provide recent proof of inspections or third-party Approval?
■Do you subcontract work to other factories, or is all the work done in-house?
What are payment options? Do you make materials in-house or outsource?

Can you handle the sourcing of materials, or do I need to provide my own?

This is all about finding suppliers willing to learn, however, if you work with companies that are NOT trying to
improve, the upside will be quite limited.
Certainly larger customers can more easily push a factory to make improvements, but can be almost impossible.
How to spot potential suppliers that are motivated to get better? Here are a few tips:
■They re-invest profits in their facilities, their equipment, in training their staff, and so on;
■They are willing to develop new products/technologies/markets, with all the due cost;
■They hire professional managers rather than family members;
They have a management team with long experience in the company, instead of continuously changing the
core team.

2. Help during product development
This step is important especially when you purchase highly customized products.
The buyer needs to take the following actions:
■Explain clearly the required specifications;
■Translate what these requirements mean in terms of production process;
Give detailed feedback on prototypes;
Train their Quality Control team to check properly during production and on the finished goods, and help set
the right test points.
For complex products, you need to consider spending time in the factory and communicating directly (better in
Chinese) with the technical team.

3. Ensure your quality standard is meet
The question is; how do you get a supplier to improve its quality, without spending a fortune on inspection in
order to catch all their mistakes?
You need to audit their quality system and their processes, and then evaluate what the priorities are. Here are a
few examples:
The managers never get out of their offices, and seldom show up on the shop floor;
■Incoming components & materials are not properly checked;
■Procedures are missing, insufficient or unclear for both operators and inspections during the production
process;
■Missing data about the most frequent defects and their root causes.
The best policy for those buyers who purchase large quantities from one supplier, is to send an engineer to the
factory on a regular basis, to discuss and show the supplier potential opportunities for improvement.
Once a manufacturer has a strong system in place and inspires enough confidence, they can be allowed to“self-inspect" and to report their findings to the buyer.

Some importers ask key suppliers for a roadmap to reduce their cost structure in the coming years (with details on how they intend to achieve these targets). This is an excellent exercise to push suppliers to think of how to work smarter, and to run some tests.

4. Re-organize production
Some other buyers know production processes better than most manufacturers they work with, and help them reduce their“costs of poor quality”(scrapped material, defects to rework, chargebacks from customer...).
When a supplier is willing to work on improving his operations, and doesn't work for direct competitors, it makes
sense to help him re-organize production for better results.