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China sourcing

Assessing a factory you cannot visit

A remote assessment will never equal standing on the floor. Done properly it still eliminates most of the suppliers that would have wasted your year.

France → China

Visiting is better. But the choice is rarely between visiting and assessing remotely; it is between assessing remotely and assessing not at all, because a trip cannot be justified for twelve candidates. The right use of a remote assessment is to reduce twelve to three, so that the visit — or the third-party audit — is spent on the ones that deserve it.

Documents that are hard to fake and easy to check

  • The business licence, with the registered name, scope of business and capital. The registered name must match the entity that will sign and be paid.
  • Certificates with their numbers and scope, verified on the certifying body's own register rather than accepted as a PDF.
  • Export records or a customer list from your own region — not as a reference, but because a factory that has never exported to Europe has never met your paperwork.
  • Test reports for a product close to yours, with the laboratory named.

The live video visit, done deliberately

Ask for a live walk rather than a recorded film, and drive it yourself: ask to see the incoming goods area, the line that would make your product, the quality control station and the warehouse — in that order, in one continuous take. What you are looking for is not tidiness but coherence: whether the capacity claimed matches the space shown, whether the people are working or waiting, whether the quality station has records on it or is a table with a lamp.

Questions whose answers cannot be improvised

  1. Which parts of my product would you make, and which would you buy? A vague answer usually means a trading company.
  2. What is your current lead time, and what did it look like six months ago? Consistency matters more than the number.
  3. Show me a non-conformity report from this year and what was done about it. A factory with no defects has no quality system.
  4. Who would be my contact, and does that person work in the factory? The answer predicts the next two years of the relationship.

A third-party audit costs less than a plane ticket and is the right complement to a remote assessment before a first large order. It does not replace eventually going — it buys you the time to go once, well.

Questions we get on this.

Can a remote assessment replace a factory visit?

It replaces the visits you would have wasted, not the one that matters. Used to reduce a long list to a short one it is very effective; used to award a large first order without any physical verification — your own or a third party's — it leaves the main risk unmanaged.

Keep reading on this.

China sourcingQualifying a Chinese supplier: what to check before the first orderFinding candidates is cheap and fast. Establishing that one of them can actually deliver what you need is the work — and it is mostly unglamorous.ShenzhenThe questions worth asking on a factory visit — and the ones that waste itA tour is not a visit. The useful questions are rarely about the machines, and the answers matter less than how easily they come.ShenzhenTrading company or factory: how to know who you are really talking toA trading company is not a problem in itself. Not knowing which one you have is — it changes the price, the lead time, and who fixes a defect.China sourcingWhy the lead time you were quoted is not the lead time you will getThe quoted figure is production time. Your real lead time contains four other things, and they are where the slippage lives.

If this raised a question about your own project, tell us where you are — the first conversation usually clarifies more than a proposal.

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