Special Edition Newsletter:
By: Fang Fang
6 reasons why you need a sourcing agency in China
In this article, we will explain how a sourcing agent can help you avoid costly mistakes upfront when it comes to far-sourcing and manufacturing in China.
What is a sourcing agency?
A sourcing agency is a service provider that searches for the right supplier for your products throughout China. A suitable supplier can produce the product you are looking for in good quality and at the best price, as well as deliver it on time and – above all – free of defects on the agreed delivery date.
A sourcing agency also handles price and contract negotiation, supplier audit, quality control, shipping, and logistics.
Reason No. 1 – A sourcing agency saves you a lot of time and nerves
Communicating and negotiating with Chinese producers can be difficult if you don’t speak Chinese yourself. It gets particularly tough regarding technical details, e.g., asking for exact dimensional and surface tolerances or product specifications. In addition, it is often very complicated to give Chinese producers an idea of components and German or European standards in general.
Anyone who has worked out a quality control checklist or a defect catalog with Chinese manufacturers knows how difficult and time-consuming this task can be.
It will take a long time if you try to explain the whole thing in English from Europe because not all Chinese speak English fluently enough. Most written communication is translated from Chinese to English using the Baidu search engine (similar to Google). Unfortunately, the quality could be better, and there are often misunderstandings.
If you engage a sourcing agency, they will contact the producer and explain what you want in the local language. These skills will save you endless amounts of time and effort.
In our experience, a good and professional sourcing agency will find two or three outstanding producers who can fulfill your order within two weeks. However, depending on the complexity of your components or specific requirements, the time can, of course, vary.
Reason No. 2 – Chinese people can negotiate with Chinese people best
Chinese people can assess each other better than we from Europe can. They know where the price limit is without losing quality.
If you negotiate in English or through interpreters, you will never get the prices a native Chinese speaker can get. In our experience, a sourcing agency can save you at least 20% on the purchase price. In addition, you pay part to the sourcing agency. Therefore, it’s a win-win situation.
Have the purchase prices negotiated by a sourcing agency. It makes your purchase faster and cheaper and helps you to find reliable producers. In addition, a sourcing agency accompanies the entire project for you on-site.
Reason No. 3 – Supplier and product audits are the be-all and end-all
If you are working with a producer for the first time, we highly recommend you visit and audit the factories. Due to travel restrictions, it was hard to get to China in the past three years. However, a sourcing agency can conduct the supplier and product audit on-site. Many things can be quickly identified via a sourcing agency, such as where the producer’s weak point or risk area is. Whether the production facility and inspection equipment will meet your production capacity and delivery time needs.
The product quality associated with the customer requirements, the technical specifications, and the applied manufacturing and testing methods must also be assessed. So that’s the thing to look for when doing supplier and product audits.
Reason No. 4 – Quality control
Another crucial point is quality control. Keep an eye on production from the beginning to the end of the job. You need an on-site inspector who monitors ongoing production and reports weekly on quality and production quantities.
Our inspector uses the internationally recognized Acceptable Quality Limit (AQL) standard for all product inspections. Our customers can set their AQL tolerance level for each inspection, and we do spot checks using tables provided by the ISO 2859 standard.
The inspector’s duties also include checking whether the components are damaged, fully machined, clean, not discolored, and not rusted; whether the parts have forging or casting defects such as cavities, cracks, or pores; whether the component labels are legible, etc.
Before shipping, we do a final check. We check whether the packaging is clean, undamaged, packed in accordance with the packaging instructions, with the correct number of items, and whether the labels are correctly labeled with the part number, number of items, address, etc.
Reason No. 5 – A sourcing agency has its own pool of suppliers
A sourcing agency has many years of experience and know-how. Our experts know exactly which foundries, forging, and machining manufacturers in China can produce your products.
Their research on the Chinese web and in the Chinese language is much more detailed than what you could research in Europe. A sourcing agency knows the Chinese market well and finds suppliers that are not represented on Alibaba or Made-in-China.
Due to technical skills and competencies in the country’s language, culture, and mentality, a sourcing agency’s experts can better explain to the producers in Chinese what kind of product they want and how the product quality or quality control should be without losing information and significant misunderstandings. It’s a great advantage for our customers.
Reason No. 6 – Trust is good – control is better! A sourcing agency protects you from fraud
We have a few customers who have already ordered goods from China on their own and had quite adventurous experiences. Especially when negotiating independently with Chinese producers, problems often arise. Problems were, e.g., that goods were not delivered after payment, the money was gone, the manufacturer went bankrupt after a few months, the components did not meet the quality requirements, and the price was okay, but there were always delays in delivery.
That’s why an on-site team is needed to take care of everything. In the end, it’s all about simplified and faster communication.
To avoid future difficulties, we advise you only transfer money or pay in advance once you have visited the producers on-site. Unfortunately, scammers are everywhere. A sourcing agency can solve this problem for you and check if your producers in China really exist and are trustworthy.
With our European-Chinese team at bdp Mechanical Components, the advantages of working together are obvious: The contact person on the customer side is an experienced, English-speaking engineer, while in China, a local team takes care of the project progress for you and can react quickly.
You are welcome to sign the contract with us in Europe, which means that we guarantee the proper execution of the order in China. This way, you avoid most of the risks in advance that are usually associated with orders in China.
If you have any further questions, please email us (sales@bdp-mc.com). We are sharing with you further information on procurement on our website. bdp Mechanical Components helps you find suitable manufacturers in China. Contact us!
