In this post, I’m going to explain how to work with a contract manufacturer (CM) in China most effectively by showing you some best practices that generally should be occurring at each stage of your product design, development, and manufacturing project.
As you may know, at Agilian we are a CM, so I’ll explain how we cooperate with our customers and some of the best practices we follow so you have a point of reference for when you’re ready to work with your CM.
What do SMEs especially need from their contract manufacturer?
Many SMEs and entrepreneurs based outside of China anywhere in the world, for example, the USA, Europe, the UK, Australia, etc, are interested in building their products in China but don’t have the time or ability to go to China itself.
They usually share a couple of features and requirements for the contract manufacturer they’ve sourced to launch their new product:
- The project needs to be cost-effective (there is money, but they need to be careful)
- They need transparency and to know who is doing what, when, etc, at any given time
- They need to get to market ASAP with a minimum of delays
A best practice to follow in order to obtain quality, reliable, compliant and safe products is also to thoroughly test and validate the design, prototypes, and processes throughout the new product development process, too. This is an involved process, but it can make the difference between receiving amazing products and scrap.
⚠️ A warning about some Chinese manufacturers ⚠️
Many Chinese-owned and managed CMs or other types of manufacturers (OEM, ODM) do not put much focus on testing products before mass production. By default, they will usually take your designs, source the necessary parts and/or materials, and manufacture them. The elephant in the room here is that they’re shipping out products that are not guaranteed to even be safe, let alone reach your quality or reliability expectations. Once they’ve been paid and shipped, you the importer is left carrying the can for subsequent product issues most of the time.
This is the opposite of how we work at Agilian.
The process of working with a CM
As an example, here are some of the things that we will do for you at Agilian as far as your electro-mechanical product is concerned in order to make your life easier. If you’re sourcing a manufacturer to help you with product development or just mass produce your product, they should ideally be following a similar process for best results.
Initial discussion about the project
We request a very short email in which we want to know exactly what you’re interested in, what product you’re building, the typical form factor and shape, and whatever else you’d like to share with us.
Once we understand the scope of your project we’ll have a zoom conference call and we’ll try to understand your needs even better by asking you questions, etc. Once we’re aligned you’ll probably have a private meeting with our team lead to outline the project costs and we’ll gladly sign and exchange NDAs to help maintain your IP security.
Assign a dedicated project manager and R&D team
Our management will assign a project manager specifically to your project, but we’ll also assign supplier, component, R&D, and testing managers who make up your team that manages your project. They will get to work on your prototype, sourcing parts, auditing suppliers, and making sure that the pre-production work is running smoothly.
Product design & development
Once everybody is on the same page we get into the actual design and development part of the project with our design team who first need to understand your goals and vision for the product. They’ll examine the specifications and detailed diagrams, CAD design, or some information from your user manual so they can visualize what your product is, in what form factor, shape and size, and what kind of specifications and features you have in mind. Then, they’ll do a feasibility analysis in order to assess how we can make your vision a reality and which design changes may be necessary to reach that goal (if any).
Our in-house industrial designers can do product design from scratch with your input or adjust existing designs that you bring to us.
Our R&D team consisting of numerous electrical and mechanical engineers will review the design and will start putting together a 3D CAD model and maybe even build an early mockup prototype using a 3D printer or soft tooling for rapid prototypes so you can see your product come alive and be able to better predict how you want it to be built.
Then, they’ll do market and engineering research and will come back to you with information about what can and can’t be achieved, what’s too expensive or reasonable in terms of either parts or suppliers, and so on. You can use this helpful information to make a decision on how you want the product to be built, then once the decision has been made the R&D team are ready to start working on prototypes and testing.
Components will be assembled, PCBs will be run in manufacturing and tested and then, eventually, the prototype will come together and we’ll have a working prototype for you to review within perhaps under 3 months depending on the project size and type. There will probably be several rounds of prototypes to get to this point.
Tooling, testing, and final prototypes
Once you have approved the prototype and the product design is locked in, it’s a matter of ordering and fabricating the hard tooling and setting up the manufacturing run using it once it’s ready. Working with component suppliers to make sure that quality components required for your product are basically ordered ahead of time for the volumes you need is also a must here to avoid overruns.
Reliability and compliance testing are done on your product and, of course, R&D testing to assure that your product is meeting all the engineering and quality requirements before mass production starts.
One of the specialities unique to Agilian compared to other contract manufacturers is that we provide full engineering support, including in-house reliability testing, and we also have our own reliability test lab and several reliability experts in our team who will provide you with the optimum reliability test plan for your product. This provides you with peace of mind that you’re building a product that is going into mass production where you won’t expect any kind of reliability issues from the design point of view.
Pilot runs, mass production, and ongoing reliability testing
When the first production smaller runs (pilot runs) happen you’re going to have the lowest yield and the highest number of issues. This is fairly normal and is where our team is able to track all the issues and fix them as fast as possible during the pilot run phase in order to minimize the cost and impact on the schedules and volumes.
Once those issues are fixed, we start to increase the production run volumes incrementally until we’re producing large enough amounts to reach the project’s requirements, say, 100,000 units.
Once production is underway it’s also helpful to create an ongoing reliability test plan (ORT) for the product, too.
The ORT is really a short version of the same reliability test plan that was done during the development except only the most critical tests are done as it’s more of a screening type of test that is looking for those key parameters to be missed.
Its purpose is to catch any issues that happened during mass production that caused reliability changes to the product. If all of a sudden, something changed in the product that was previously tested and validated before production and it’s now performing out of spec, the ORT will catch the issues and you’ll have to put in place an immediate critical corrective action plan and re-run the full reliability and validation tests that you had done at the time of the final development. Finally, production is back to normal and there are no longer any issues.
Communication with the contract manufacturer
A key point when getting to grips with how to work with a contract manufacturer is communication. This can sometimes be lacking in Chinese companies.
At Agilian, you’ll benefit from:
- Daily and weekly updates from the project manager (in English)
- A schedule showing the plan for the days and the weeks ahead
- Enforceable agreements signed by both parties that are reasonable and protect your interests
Ideally, this will be the case with your CM, too.
Some SMEs also don’t realize how important creating a clear quality standard is, for example, for communicating their needs and expectations to contract manufacturers. We’ll help you put it together, but other manufacturers may not mention it at all leading to them working in a very grey area where your expectations are concerned.
Reducing field failure risks
In general, going into mass production and selling products that haven’t been well-tested and validated is full of risks. Trying to repair the damage after the fact can be done, but it’s more difficult than doing the testing during product development.
The following examples illustrate this point…
- In the case where your product is being developed and manufactured by us, then we’re aware of all the risks related to it so when we’re developing its reliability test plan we take them into consideration and develop tests to mitigate and find them before it goes to high volume production and gets sold to consumers.
- In other cases where we did not design or develop the product and didn’t even manufacture it, we have many clients who have previously done some design and testing work that come to us with all kinds of reliability issues in the field asking for help to solve them. We try to understand the product and situation with the field return rates and quality issues you’re having and retrospectively create a reliability test plan that is just right or find the issues and do a Pareto analysis to figure out which issues need immediate attention and fixes from the engineering team. This will, hopefully, lower your field risks quite quickly.
- Finally, some customers come to us needing reliability testing who have never even had an engineering or development team working on their product, no reliability tests done, etc. In this case, we probably won’t know what kind of development has been done on the product, but having worked on hundreds of different product types we do our best based on our experience for that type of product to develop a test case or a reliability test plan that is going to best find and then fix those issues.
Conclusion
The purpose of this post is to show you a brief introduction to how we work with customers on a new product development and manufacturing project so you can understand how to work with a contract manufacturer in China that you have sourced.
If your manufacturer doesn’t suggest the above stages and activities this could be a sign that they’re not as thorough as you would need them to be in order to get products that reach you and your customers’ expectations on time and on budget.
Get help
First, if you have any questions about working with a CM, please contact us and we’ll try to answer them.
Second, we may be an option for your project. As a foreign-owned and managed CM in China, Agilian follows Western business practices and aims to provide the same levels of service you’d expect in your own country.
We’re a full-service EMS providing in-house product design, development, engineering, reliability testing, quality inspections (Incoming QC, Outgoing QC, In-Process QC), and production.
Learn more about Agilian and feel free to request a no-strings discussion about your product at any time.
Disclaimer
Here at Agilian, we are not lawyers. What we wrote above is based only on our understanding of the legal requirements. We do not present this information as a basis for you to make decisions, and we do not accept any liability if you do so. Consider consulting a lawyer before making legal decisions.
