Made In China – Getting Our Product Manufactured
in China
We had determined that we could not make a profit
with our product without finding a way to manufacture it for
substantially less money than it was costing us at the time. My partner
who does the marketing had met a gentleman (Jerry) who was having
several products made in China and selling them through U.S. and
Canadian companies.
Jerry was familiar with our product and believed it
could really be a big seller if we could get it off the ground. Jerry
had an associate, Sue, a Chinese woman who lives in Shanghai and works
with him doing translating and acting as a go between for several small
factories.
Our product, a small pump that installs under sinks
to bring hot water fast to the fixture without running water down the
drain, would require a motor, an injection molded pump, an electronic
circuit board, and the case. Since we had to have new tooling made we
wanted to make some improvements and changes to the pump at the same
time.
Our old pump was a gear pump and made a lot of
noise. We sent our old pump, a small centrifugal pump similar to what
we wanted to switch to, and a set of drawings of what we wanted to end
up with. We also sent a schematic, circuit board layout, and even a
fully functional sample circuit board.
After about 30 to 60 days, I don’t remember
exactly, we received the first set of prototypes. There were a host of
problems with the parts, and we sent back instructions how to bring the
parts up to par.
For some reason the Chinese had made changes to the
circuit board even though we sent them a functional working sample.
Part of our arrangement with the Chinese manufacturer called for the
product to be listed with ETL labs as complying with the UL standards
for motor operated pumps. I could see that some of the spacings on the
circuit board were too close together to be approved. After a couple
more changes we got the circuit board problems straightened out.
Pretty much the same held true for the pump, motor,
and case. They all had initial problems, but after several tries the
factory got it right, and we place our first order, a sample size of 250
pumps.
My partner headed off to China for the first run of
500 pumps, and it was a very good thing he did. It took about 2 weeks,
but they finally got those first 250 pumps assembled and tested. We
placed great emphasis on testing. The circuit boards are functionally
tested before the pump is assembled, and each motor is tested before
being assembled to the pump head. After everything is assembled the
pump is hooked up to water lines and tested again.
One of the problems we encountered at first was
difficulty with translations and things like being able to view drawings
and get files to open.
The Chinese manufacturer is just as concerned as we
are with quality control. He wants lots of orders and he knows they
won’t come if we have quality control issues with the product.
Even with all that testing, the real test begins in
the field. We got about 30 percent of the pumps back from that first
batch. There were a number of problems that showed up. Not enough
testing apparently. We had to beef up some of the injection molded
parts, make some small changes to the mold tooling, and do a much better
job of testing. The same thing happened with the following two small
batches of 250 pumps, and we had finally reached the point where were
confident enough to put in our first big order…well to us it was big…of
1,000 pumps.
In the meantime we were having all kinds of
problems with ETL labs in Shanghai. The factory kept having
difficulties with the ETL engineers, so they would ask me to intervene,
and I would then get into an email exchange with an engineer at ETL labs
in Shanghai. It seemed to me like they didn’t really understand what
they were doing. For instance, at one point they told us that the 2.5
amp fuse we were using was too small and we needed to put a 4 amp fuse
in. Excuse me…that is crazy, the fuse would never blow!
It took about half a dozen emails and some data
sheets from the manufacturer to convince ETL Shanghai to let us use a
smaller fuse. There were several more strange requests from the Chinese
ETL engineers, but we finally got everything resolved and obtained our
ETL listing. It seemed to me that most of the problems were probably
due to translation problems with the UL Standards documents.
Now things are proceeding quite smoothly. We were
fortunate to stumble onto a very good situation. Jerry travels to China
frequently and Sue is a very good translator and has a good relationship
with the manufacturer that we are dealing with. The manufacturer
recognizes the importance of producing a superior product, and has bent
over backward to comply with all of our wishes.
If you can find good people to deal with and good
translation, and if you are willing to travel to China a few times, it
can be quite worthwhile.
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