Brief Survey for OEM's about Outsourcing

[treesei]

Note: This survey is for OEM's seeking for contract manufacturers especially overseas. This survey is NOT for buyers of ready-made products which can be found from wholesale websites.

1. How do you find contract manufacturers?
a. By online research done internally (such as by yourself or Purchasing Dept).
b. By hiring an external agency or individual to do the search.
c. By recommendations from any source.
d. Other channels. (Please specify).

2. If you have outsourced to China, did you ever worry that the Chinese and English versions of the manufacturing documents (Quality plan etc) did match each other?
a. No problem. (End of survey).
b. Yes I did. (Go to 3.)

3. How did you solve the problem?
a. I don't care about the documents as long as the products meet specs.
b. I wish someone could do a check for me but I took the chance.
c. I have internal resource to verify the documents.
d. I hired external resource to verify the documents.

[Stijloor]

A Quick Bump!

[somashekar]

Do you want someone to second this short survey ?
Points 1,2,3 seems pretty straight forward and logical and so OK...
I would have added batch approval process, Packaging and logistics process, Contracting norms and non conformance handling process.

[MIREGMGR]

In Reply to Parent Post by treesei

1. How do you find contract manufacturers?
a. By online research done internally (such as by yourself or Purchasing Dept).

2. If you have outsourced to China, did you ever worry that the Chinese and English versions of the manufacturing documents (Quality plan etc) did match each other?
a. No problem. (End of survey).

A number of years ago, we set up a wholly owned Chinese company with closely integrated management and technical operations to do component making and contract manufacturing. The entire management team of the China operation is native Chinese and fully technical-bilingual. Personnel go back and forth regularly, and we have phone contact every evening and morning plus constant email and videoconferencing when needed. When we need external suppliers of manufacturing services or materials, they act as an extension of our supplier-finding/qualifying network.

[RosieA]

Similar to Miregmgr, my company, which is multi-national, has Sourcing Specialists in Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. the staff are native to the areas they serve and technically competent.

I'd be lost without them. They find the comapnies, do the audits, do first articles, manage supplier problems, etc.

[treesei]

Thanks folks. The reason I asked was that I saw people looking for external resources (very cheap local individuals) on Internet to do such work for them and started to wonder how reliable such resources could be.