When you are outsourcing the production process in an offshore location, it is acceptable to be concerned that your product quality will be consistent. Decline in quality is a huge threat. When there’s a defect in a large batch of product, you won’t be able to fix them in your retail location, because the production facility is located so far away. Also fixing one problem may result in causing other problems. If you let unforeseen issues to appear in your products, things can really be quite expensive. You need to measure the quality of your product so you will get best results. It is a good idea to implement proper automation of product testing. You need to have a dedicated system to ensure that you have stable product quality and you need to implement the proper metrics. You should invest in building a system that ensures the quality of your products. By offshoring the production process, a company may save millions of dollars. So, it is a good idea to allocate some of the money you save for the monitoring process.
It is a good thing if you post staff at the production facility. It means that the production process can be fully monitored and products can be completes in the desired timeframe. Without monitoring, the offshore production team will slowly lose sight of the original goals and requirements. Your staff should make sure that the production team is able to have high understanding of the requirements. You should make sure that personal relationships can be established well. There should be at least weekly meetings between your staff and the offshore production team. The constant interaction will ensure that you will be able to build mutual confidence and respect. International travel is often seen as a form of achievement among employees. You need to make sure that they are well committed and motivated. After you maintain constant interaction with the production team, you still need to test the products continuously. Statistically, there could be defective products in the batch. There are also different metrics of the production process that needs to be assessed.
You should make sure that you are able to detect the problem quickly. Early detection is essential, so problems can be addressed immediately. There’s no magic solution in ensuring that problems won’t happen, even if you have intensive monitoring. Even if products have been tested in the production site, there should be enough pre-release testing procedure. It is important to separate the production and monitoring/testing teams. They need to be assigned in different organizational hierarchy, so there’s minimal conflict of interest. This should be a relatively easy method to implement and combining both teams can be seen as common pitfalls. Cooperation is a good thing in any professional setting, but this could be quite counter-productive in offshore production process. Separation of production and monitoring teams maintains product quality in a big way. So it is a great things to implement.
