Proactive Supplier Relationship Management Solutions and Production Oversight

Supplier Management in China

Do you want control over your orders and get the most out of your supply chain and your suppliers? Than proactive supplier relationship management solutions are for you. Proactive management identifies and solve quality challenges before they affect your orders, and it’s one of our most effective china import services.

What problems do our Supplier Relationship Management solutions solve?

There are several situations in which you may decide to manage the production hands-on:

1. You want to ensure that everything is running well and that problems are found and solved early to prevent unnecessary costs and delays.
2. You work with a particular supplier and think output quality can be improved, and the factory should do more to prevent problems.
3. You have to work with mediocre factories, but you still want to get the best out of it for your orders.
4. You order customised products and want to monitor the process and output closely.

What do our Supplier Relationship Management solutions include?

To optimize supplier performance, we developed our own TSCI methodology for your ultimate proactive supplier relationship management solution. A strong methodology based on systematic approach, essential for managing your suppliers[1].

 TSCI (Transparency, Strategy, Control, Improvement) provides a structured approach to hands-on oversight. When applied to supplier management and quality control, our process helps maximise outputs while reducing risks.

1. Transparency: Uncover issues

Our “Transparency” process aims to understand potential risks or deviations from your goals. We analyze factories’ processes, quality systems, staffing to see how these don’t align with your business goals.

By assessing production lines, equipment, workforce duties and quality controls, we identify weakness points and areas needing improved inspections or oversight. This helps prevent potential issues and improve management. We help you assess where to implement inspections or push the factory to self-inspect, to better manage your factory in China.

We determine key factors impacting quality standards, costs, delays and problem-solving to prioritise improvement areas. Then assess how willing the factory is to cooperate and make improvements.

If we work with a factory that shows the willingness to improve, we can find the appropriate incentives and communication strategy to get the most out of your orders.

2. Strategy for improvement

The goal for developing a strategy is to have a method to drive short term and long term improvements and to provide a framework for transparency and collaboration. Our strategy involves establishing short and long-term quantifiable goals with agreed-upon timelines. We aim for quick wins by finding ignored issues on the factory floor and address them to minimise production risks. Our focus is on long term improvements by setting up goals and KPIs to track progress on crucial issues, such as defect rates.

We define appropriate incentives and communication strategy and build a regular feedback system to get the most out of your orders. Our systematic approach manages priorities helps you to strategise on how to work with your suppliers, for example to find alternatives, manage the factory stricter or negotiate better contract terms.

3. Control: Hands-on production management

When we manage the factory, we track key metrics and provide regular feedback to get the best possible result. Using a grading system, we quantitatively monitor KPIs like:

• Components and materials use: We verify quality and demand feedback from suppliers over their inspection activity and result to strengthen incoming quality control, prevent that inferior components are used and to ensure they all comply with your standards.
• Check for understanding: We ensure all parties understand the major requirements and product specifications. We check with production and technical managers how they implement these in practice. We ensure that requirements issues are addressed throughout the work floor.
• Feedback during production: We engage in regular dialogue, asking for their process controls and how they will mitigate and promptly resolve risks/issues to prevent escalation. We ask for feedback on how they follow procedures and give work instructions. We push managers to get to the work floor, actively monitor the production process, and bring discipline.
• Push for quick wins: We push for minor improvements that the factory can quickly implement and substantially impact quality. Small changes can be made to take advantage of some obvious opportunities. For example, when workers put items on the floor, we ensure a soft floor surface, so scratches on the product can be avoided.
• Check the internal inspection: We ask for feedback on problems and internal inspection outcomes. We push the factory to keep track of its in-house quality control, which may prevent poor results you would otherwise only find later.
• Check the loading: We ensure adequate packaging to protect goods in transit by asking for on-site validation, such as photos.

We prevent many problems by proactively managing the supplier and find improvements across all production phases. For some problems and risks, it is helpful to physically visit the factory and inspect on-site, especially when working with a new supplier or customised or complex products.

Performing pre-production or during-production inspections can detect problems at the point of occurrence. Additionally, when visiting the factory, there is an opportunity to communicate directly with technicians and production managers.

4. Improvement: Long-term partnerships for continuous progress

During long-term cooperation, we strive for constant and continuous improvement of outcomes. We partner closely with factories to better identify major production risks and ensure close monitoring.

Then make the factory aware of the need for their own proactive, hands-on oversight of operations by creating a culture of risk awareness. We check if the managers follow production, push them out of their offices to inspect the work floor regularly, and provide us with feedback and proof.

Changes and improvements will be constantly evaluated over time. We contact the factory and find solutions to improve even more. Sometimes, we find incentives to enhance the outcome quality even more. For example, we can set KPIs for inspection results and fines or bonuses depending on the outcome. You can expect quality problems to reduce substantially when we manage your factory in China for several orders.

Benefits of our supplier relationship management solutions for your company:

• We help you saving you lots of time by preventing potential quality risks, by following the production for you hands-on.
• We help you improve manufacturing results in the short run.
• We help improve your brand reputation in the long run.
• Our method is effective and cost-efficient. We let the factory do the work of improving their output.

Contact us today to learn more about how our proactive production management services help you to optimise your output from the supplier and contribute to a full China supply chain management optimalisation.