How to monitor the production progress when purchasing from China？

In China’s manufacturing industry, many things can not be said in common sense.

If you have ever purchased from China, you will find that most of the suppliers can not deliver on the promised delivery time. And they’re gonna tell you a whole bunch of reasons. For example, equipment is broken, there are not enough workers, or did not anticipate the difficulty of production, and so on.

We are far away from home and may not be able, to tell the truth about what the supplier has said. Then what we should do is to avoid the occurrence of a delay in delivery. In addition to strictly evaluating the supplier before placing an order, all we have to do after placing an order is to follow up on the production progress of the factory and monitor the progress of the intermediate process.

This article will introduce some nodes that you need to monitor after placing an order. Allows you to discover abnormal factors that affect efficiency through production progress monitoring to ensure that products are shipped in quality and quantity on schedule.

Although various production industries have different strategies when monitoring production schedules, the key points are always the same! For production progress monitoring, we usually do monitoring before production and monitoring during production.

Pre-production monitoring, that is, the production plan, material preparation status, personnel status, equipment preparation status, product information status confirmation. We should keep close contact with the supplier, ask for the progress of the supplier at these times, and let the supplier take photos to prove the authenticity.

If you ask the factory how about the material preparation, if the factory did not give you an accurate answer which day the material will be in storage, then you should focus on following up this work. Ask the supplier about the material readiness every few days and put pressure on the supplier to take this issue seriously.

Monitoring in production. Pay attention to the frequency and tools of progress monitoring, verification of inspection status, verification of semi-finished products, verification of storage status. You can ask for the quantity of semi-finished or finished products 10 days after the supplier tells you the order is in production to estimate the daily capacity of the plant and approximate delivery time. For very large orders, you can even ask the supplier to update the order production schedule to you periodically.

The most terrible thing is not the delay, but the supplier will not take the initiative to tell you that there is a problem with the order. They always tell you that they have to delay the delivery when the delivery date is about to come, so you are caught off guard. Therefore, it is very important to monitor the progress of the order so that we can know the real situation of the order know and discuss the solution with the supplier as soon as there is a problem.