Today, China’s domestic electronics manufacturing has developed for nearly 30 years. From the early model dominated by foreign-funded factories, it has gradually been replaced by domestic factories. With the rapid development of e-commerce and the need to meet the fast iteration demands of the electronics industry, a relatively clear division of labor and cooperation has now formed in the electronics industry. Sales, R&D, manufacturing, and supply chain have each become separate industries. It is no longer the past model of integrating R&D, sales, and manufacturing. For sales- and R&D-oriented enterprises, finding a matching contract manufacturer is an important part. Here are several suggestions on how to choose a suitable contract manufacturer in China:
Table of Contents
I. Consider the Outsourcing Business:
1. Pure contract manufacturing:
The client provides materials, process requirements, and prototypes to the processing factory. This is suitable for simple processes, small order volumes, non-planned orders, and cases with no customer factory audit requirements. It is more appropriate to find small and medium-sized manufacturers for production. Small factories are more flexible in accepting orders. Their owners are usually production supervisors or engineering personnel who have worked in large or medium-sized factories for some time before starting their own businesses. Of course, before placing an order, it is best to visit the factory to understand the basic situation, such as the contract manufacturer’s main customers, product types, workshop 5S, and equipment precision. To control operating costs, such small and medium-sized factories generally have one person holding multiple roles, and rarely have full-time staff for quality inspection, engineering, warehouse, and planning. It is recommended to send personnel to follow up on-site during production to prevent quality and delivery abnormalities from going unnoticed and unhandled.
2. Labor-and-material contracting:
The client provides prototypes and BOM data; material procurement and processing are fully entrusted to the contract manufacturer. For this model, it is necessary to evaluate the contract manufacturer’s scale, capital, supplier bargaining power, supplier management capability, incoming material inspection capability, and other one-stop service capabilities. For some key materials, it is best to specify the brand or purchase them yourself and provide them to the contract manufacturer to avoid quality problems.
II. Engineering and Technical Capability:
When an enterprise only has R&D and sales and no pilot-production engineers, it needs to find a factory with strong engineering and technical conversion capability when choosing a contract manufacturer. Provide prototypes to the contract manufacturer for evaluation, and it should be able to raise different questions and improvement suggestions regarding product reliability, manufacturability, and cost. If the factory has no engineering evaluation capability, the client enterprise itself must have the relevant engineering capability; otherwise, there is a relatively high probability of problems in product production.
III. Qualification Requirements:
The client should find factories with relevant qualifications corresponding to the industry of the product to be outsourced. For example, medical products require medical-related system certification such as ISO13485; automotive parts require TS16949; CCC home appliance products require CCC factory audit experience.
IV. Other Aspects:
1. Clarify your own product processing requirements:
For electronic products, you need to look at your own product process and whether the outsourcing factory can meet your process requirements. Choose a factory with full-process capabilities. Many electronics factories are only willing to do the SMT placement process. If you choose such a factory, you will need to find another factory for subsequent processes. If quality problems occur, the two factories may easily pass the responsibility to each other.
2. Look for contract manufacturing enterprises with production qualifications for your own products.
Choose to cooperate with factories that have good production strength, scientific research level, and cooperation reputation. Explain your specific customization requirements for electronic products through samples, drawings, formulas, and other forms.
3. Look at production strength:
Mainly focus on the OEM factory’s production capacity and the standardization of its production process. This is a necessary guarantee for product quality and delivery.
4. Look at cooperation reputation:
Choosing a contract manufacturing enterprise with a good reputation not only finds a stable incubation factory for your product but also selects a long-term partner. Reputation investigation can focus on examining the OEM manufacturer’s long-term cooperative customers. A manufacturer with a good reputation will naturally have many long-term customers.
