Do You Know How to Audit Any China Factory?

Whenever you decide to buy a product from a new source, it is essential to audit the source company to ensure that you are getting your products of the right quality. Chinese products are no exception, rather you must be more vigilant.

However, before you audit any Chinese factories, you must have enough Chinese factory audit knowledge. Let us therefore discuss in this post how can you audit any China factory before sourcing any product from that country.

How to plan for auditing any factory in China?

While doing any factory audit in China, you need to concentrate on the following few aspects:

To collect base info about the Chinese factory: Here you must collect the basic info like what is their manpower, licensing details of the company, technical capabilities, production capacity, and a few details about their process.
To evaluate whether the factory is capable to produce the desired product: Next important thing to check is all about the infrastructure of the factory. Whether the company has suitable equipment/machinery to produce your products.
To ascertain whether the factory has any quality management systems: Last but not least, you must try to audit their quality management system. Quality should not be limited to the production phase only, but also during the pre and post-production stages.

These days after the COVID phase, while auditing and Chinese factory, you must have the following Chinese factory audit knowledge.

Audit of Chinese factories has become the most important

As far as China is concerned, it is considered as World’s factory, as this country has started producing almost all kinds of products and supplying them to different parts of the world.

However, after the Covid phase, there are many steps being ignored or skipped by most of the Chinese factories. As a result, it has become more important to audit the Chinese factory before you enter into any business agreement.

Audit should not be confused with inspection

While auditing a Chinese factory, you must clearly understand the difference between auditing and inspection. These are two different activities.

Inspection: This will assess the product quality in a batch.
Audit: This will assess the management systems as well as manufacturing processes of the supplier.

Few Chinese suppliers may not take factory audits positively

Often many Chinese companies may feel offended when the discussion of factory audits takes place. Few companies are afraid of getting bad reputation on the market.

However, you need to convince them the necessity of auditing so that you can get to know the real situation of the factory.

You must have the right focus while auditing

You must have the right focus while auditing any Chinese factory. The following are a few things that you might be interested to know:

Security aspects
Capability of the factory
Social compliance
Product Quality
Environment audit.

Therefore, you must have the right focus based on the above while auditing a factory.

Audit is a one-time activity and not part of your process

You need to understand that a factory audit should be done once when you are going to choose a Chinese company as your prospective supplier.

You must have the right Chinese factory audit knowledge while auditing.

However, once the auditing is done and you have approved a company, then you need not audit every time while doing business with the same company.

Conclusion

While dealing with any Chinese company, you must have the right Chinese factory audit knowledge to start with. You can certainly not have confidence unless and until you have audited the company to your satisfaction.

After the Covid period, the norms for auditing Chinese companies have become more important. However, it is important to handle sensitive issues with Chinese companies tactfully.