Is Your Business Ready? 5 Signs You Could Benefit from an Overseas Manufacturing Partner
Have you considered working with an overseas manufacturing and product development partner? If not, maybe it’s time you did. Whether you need help with finding the right factory, product development, program management, or quality assurance, an overseas manufacturing partner can be a valuable ally for your business.
Is your business in need of a sourcing partner for its overseas product development and manufacturing? Here are five signs you could benefit from an overseas manufacturing partner like Flywheel Sourcing.
Your Growth Is Stagnant
An outsourcing partner can help you develop a successful program that allows you to reach your growth goals. They can also help execute that program, freeing up your team’s time to focus on growing your business. Allowing more time to focus on sales and innovation is one of the best ways to drive growth.
Here are a few ways an overseas manufacturing partner can help you grow:
Analyze and optimize costing to meet your goals
Develop and manage timelines and key milestones
Anticipate potential roadblocks based on past experience
Develop and implement corrective action plans
Provide engineering and product design support
Locate appropriate factories for new or existing products
Ensure end customer requirements can be met
Provide options for packaging development and merchandising
Manage supply chain optimization and other logistics challenges
With this level of support, you can increase your capacity to leverage growth opportunities and boost your ROI. In this sense, a sourcing partner can be a valuable resource to support your business growth.
2. You’re Experiencing Communication Barriers With Your Factories
Clear communication is critical when you manufacture overseas. When you can’t be there physically to oversee production, communication and transparency can be a struggle—especially when you run into language or cultural barriers.
An outsourcing partner helps ensure clear, consistent communication with the factories you work with. Not only are they your eyes and ears, ensuring quality controls are in place, but they also facilitate communication. Having this support on the ground in the factory’s time zone speeds up all aspects of the product development cycle and helps get your products to market faster while meeting your expectations.
Even if you fluently speak the language of the country in which your factories are located, you could still run into cultural or social differences that can be difficult to work through from afar. An overseas partner that is well-versed in local languages and customs will be able to help you navigate any points of confusion or concern.
3. You’re Spending Too Much Time on Tasks That Could Be Done More Efficiently By Outsourcing
There are a number of tasks within overseas manufacturing that can be done much more efficiently by a partner who specializes in those tasks and who has boots on the ground in the regions where your factories are located.
A partner like Flywheel can help you with:
Quality control: Quality control is much more efficiently done by a partner with staff nearby your factories. (We’ll discuss quality control more in the next section.)
Factory audits: Both scheduled and random audits are important checks and balances to ensure the factory’s processes and conditions are regularly evaluated. Working with a sourcing partner gives you peace of mind that the factories you work with are in compliance with both international regulations and your company’s requirements.
Locating factories for new products: Having a partner with boots on the ground gives you an advantage here. They can provide factory details and images, provide quotes from factories in multiple locations, negotiate optimal costing, ensure end customer requirements can be met, identify testing protocols, and ensure factory compliance.
Freeing up your time: If you wake up each morning to an inbox full of topics and issues to address, that takes your time from the higher level planning and execution needed to drive the growth of your company. Problems should come with solutions and choices to rectify. Having a team that manages that for you and helps streamline communication will free up your time and lower your stress.
4. You’re Struggling With Quality Control Issues
Quality control is one of the most vital aspects of offshore manufacturing.
Even the best product won’t succeed if it doesn’t meet the highest quality standards. Product defects can result in the headaches of a high return rate and poor customer reviews that impact sales. Even worse, they can cause a loss of customer faith in your company.
Effective quality control requires consistent adherence to established quality assurance processes.
An outsourcing partner can ensure your expectations for quality are met. A good partner will provide quality control and compliance for every PO, with extensive testing capabilities including mechanical and physical properties, chemical substance evaluation, environmental evaluation, packaging evaluation, carton testing, battery and electronics properties evaluation, and more.
An overseas sourcing partner can also help ensure program quality and compliance with client requirements by pre-screening factories, accredited lab testing and pre-testing, continuous audits, and AQL final random inspections before every order shipment.
5. Your Eggs Are All in One Basket When It Comes to Sourcing
If your sourcing is all coming from one country, it’s time to consider diversifying.
Regardless of which country you’re manufacturing in, It’s wise to divide up your supply chain so it’s not all concentrated in one place. Too much exposure to a single country can put your business at risk due to increased costs, public health-related shutdowns, natural disasters, geopolitical tensions, and more. Leveraging competition across different countries makes for a healthier, stronger business.
Effective sourcing means choosing the right factory in the right location for your unique product and quantity requirements. An outsourcing partner who works in multiple countries (such as Flywheel) can help you do this seamlessly by considering the expertise each country has and helping you choose the one that best aligns with your product’s needs.
Plus, all of your business is consolidated in one partner, making communication and program management that much smoother.
Is Your Business Ready for an Overseas Manufacturing Partner?
If you think your business would benefit from help in any or all of these areas, it might be time to consider an outsourcing partner.
When you partner with Flywheel Sourcing, we’ll help keep your supply chain agile, manage quality control, navigate customs issues, and much more, with the ultimate goal of helping you grow a successful business.
To discuss your needs and learn more about what Flywheel can do for you, give us a call at 763-442-9028 or send an email to info@flywheelsourcing.com.