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Rough Guide to Outsourcing In China
zentec writes, "An article in Design News chronicles WiLife's outsourcing project to China (they make consumer surveillance cameras). It's a tale of a language barrier, misplaced EEPROMS, backyard engineering, incorrectly assembled parts, sloppy engineering, and flaring tempers. That, and an initial defect rate of nearly 80%." In the end WiLife seemed happy enough with their outsourced manufacturing. This is a nitty-gritty account of life under globalization.
This is true. Outsourcing is a race to the bottom. The idea is to produce something cheaply that is just "good enough". Quality be damned, just hit the market with a cheap product. This prevents quality good from selling, which then results in all goods eventually being low quality.
I consider open source to be the same idea: make something cheap that is just "good enough", but the finish quality is ignored. This will push out all competitors out the the market, since no one can compete with something that is "good enough" and free. The end result is that all software will eventually go downhill in quality (if it hasn't already).
I remember my first encounter with Chinese manufacturing.
:)
The factory had pictures of their product in their brochures. I was about to place a sample order when I noticed a picture of the product being made on their production line. It looked NOTHING like the one in their brochure. Closer inspection revealed that their product brochure consisted of products made by reputable manufacturers but with the brand names edited out (quite poorly). Shame on me for not spotting something so obvious before.
Their actual products - a poor quality copy.
Of course, that is my experience as a sample of one out of one. Hardly representative, I know, but kinda representative of TFA.
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
The third shift is slang for when the CM continues to manufacture more of your product without being asked about it. The goal, of course, is to shunt this product to a separate market and undercut your production (after all, they don't have marketing, R&D, etc to pay for). Since these CMs often handle inventory for you, they can order extra parts without you knowing.
Or they take your design, modify it, and manufacture their own (possibly inferior) version. They have everything they need - board layouts (schematic can be derived), binary object code (for FPGAs, flash memory, etc), parts lists, etc.
Just a hazard of outsourced production.
Having worked with many people from the area of Taiwan/China in engineering, I have found that many of them don't understand the concept of craftsmanship and maintainability....I think Communism killed the concept of quality in these countries.
Pity Taiwan was never Communist, or your argument might have some merit.
And what exactly has the Professional Cricketers' Association and The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts to do with this ?
PCA is industry lingo for Printed Circuit Assembly (with parts installed), as opposed to PCB, the bare board.
Things will continue along this path until the free-traders acknowledge the problems with their philosophy:
- Freely trading with protectionist countries such as China is not good economically. Giving these countries free and unfettered access to our markets while they limit our access to their markets provides those countries no incentive to change.
- Freely trading with countries that can not afford our goods and services is not good economically. They can not buy our goods and services, so this trade is only one-way, further increasing our trade deficit and draining our money.
- Offshoring jobs to other countries means lowering our standard of living, which is not good economically.
We do not need to close our borders from all foreign goods. We can have fair trade treaties with third world countries. And free trade deals are perfectly fine with other first world countries which have protections for workers and the environment and who pay employees wages comparable to those in the US.I disagree with the poster above. I have been to China and am a Malaysian. While it's true that water is safe to drink mostly, I find that the bacteria in the water is different from that in the US. Therefore, if you've been in the US for a long time, you are almost guaranteed to get some stomach irritation when you drink tap water in a 3rd world country. I generally recommend guests from US to drink bottled water when they visit.
Washing/sanitizing silverware with tea when eating in Chinese restaurants is partly cultural, and also partly because the restaurants usually wash silverware by hand and they aren't very clean. It is normal to do this in normal street-side restaurants.