Manufacturing Troubleshooting To Solve Supplier Issues

Manufacturing troubleshooting brings the right Sofeast experts into your supplier’s site to manage issues such as ballooning costs, late delivery, and quality problems. We will diagnose the source, stop it from happening, and put in place measures to prevent it from happening again.

This is particularly useful if you’re unable to be hands-on with your supplier in China, as the first you may know of serious production issues is when they’ve already begun to affect you negatively.

What is Sofeast’s manufacturing troubleshooting solution?
If you feel the need for someone to coordinate your projects for you and push the suppliers where needed, our project managers can step in and do this for you.

Here are a few examples of key production issues we can improve and how:

Why choose this solution?
If you are suffering from a supplier’s poor performance in terms of quality, cost, and/or timing, and if the factory staff accept external help, it makes sense to send experienced engineer(s) to assess the situation, suggest improvements, and provide guidance in order to implement them.

You can also read the QualityInspection.org supplier development blog post archive for more information.

Who is troubleshooting suitable for?
Any situation where the importer is in a long-term relationship with a manufacturer, and/or is suffering greatly from a painful situation.

On the factory’s side, we found that requests coming from a large customer are always better attended to than those from smaller customers.

What activities make up this solution?
Firstly, we go on site and observe the processes and the situation in general.

If the issue is well-known and the fix is pretty straightforward, our engineer can make suggestions and set up an action plan (to be approved by yourself and the manufacturer), and then we can provide technical guidance on how to apply the plan. We report progress to our client.

If the issue is relatively complex (e.g. several distinct problems to approach separately, or disagreement among the factory staff on what the issue really is), it usually makes sense to spend more time at the “plan” stage before going into the “do” and “check” stages. Getting the buy-in, not only on the issue but also on the action plan, from the people who will work on the solution is critical.

Generally speaking, our engineers tend to follow the 8D Problem Solving Process when tackling your issues:

How is it reported?
The initial ‘diagnostic’ is reported in detail, with photos, comments, and data where possible.

Once an improvement project is underway, reporting usually comes in the form of updates to the action plan (what tasks are in progress, have been done, etc.) and in the business results (e.g. the number of good pieces per day, first-pass yield, etc.).

How much does it cost?
For complex issues, daily cost ranges from 425 USD + expenses for a junior engineer to 850 USD + expenses per for a senior engineer.

For relatively simple issues, prices can often be lower.