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June 20, 2006
why does NO One accept responsibility ?
Been a hectic 6 weeks since coming back to London setting up operations and having our container stuck at the Port for 7 days awaiting inspection by customs whilst being charged a daily rate for this pleasure.
That aside, everything finally arrived, and our team had a 12 stage quality control process they wanted to go through, even after the factories in China do their own version.
So basically we had 2 suppliers, and the end result was this:
a, Supplier A had a 2% failure rate, much better than expected, and they were very minor issues which can be solved easily by us here.
b, Supplier B had basically a 100% failure rate, every item we bought is NOT sellable, without going into specifics, just imagine that you are buying a casing for a mobile phone, consisting of 2 parts which attached together form 1 unit, in this case part a and part b are different sizes, and NO body bothered checking this in China, although quality control on individual items was done perfectly, common sense was amiss and no one made sure the 2 pieces were the same size.
I emailed both suppliers with my findings, and below is a snapshot of their replies:
a, We think your staff must have damaged the 1& of goods which you say are faulty as we never have problems with other customers, please tell your staff to be careful as they have obviously damaged the goods.
b, We personally inspected every item, maybe we can send you replacements if it helps.
Now maybe I am missiong something very obvious here, that whenever I am in the worng, I am the first guy to put my hands up and "sorry, my fault", however it seems that my 2 suppliers don't work like this.
I had read in many many books about such stories, but this was 1st hand experience, in somebody not wanting to lose Face and accept responsibility. The most baffling thing is that I praised supplier A for having such a low failure rate, and still they come back with a counter email.
Oh well, supposed it's all part of the learning curve when dealing with China eh ;)
Posted by shak at 6:34 PM | Comments (3)