Overseas Reliability
Published February 10, 2010
By now, most of you have read about Toyota’s massive, now global, recall of automobiles, an enormous surprise given their reputation for outstanding quality and reliability. However, a secretive corporate culture further reveals that the notion of “saving face” often times does disrupt the need for transparency and engineering reliability in even the perceived best of companies. We all know about the Chinese tainted milk issues, once again surfacing (Wall Street Journal article, February 9, 2010) as unscrupulous Chinese businessmen recycled the confiscated melamine-tainted milk powder and are again letting it slip into the food chain.
Exploding batteries, electrical fires in appliances – again designed and built in Japan – bad meat, defective materials substitutions in otherwise highly engineered products built for export to places such as the United States. All absolutely outrageous examples of loose quality control, terribly shady business practices with the sole purpose of enhancing profits. Now the WSJ has yet another article revealing that Japan’s Koito Industries said that it falsified safety-testing data for some 150,000 seats installed on about 1,000 Boeing and Airbus planes (February 10, 2010).
Who can you trust, especially in a period of time when so many expatriates and overseas product managers are being sent home or having their foreign travel budgets severely curtailed? Exactly who is “minding the store” in so many distant supplier outposts such as China? I personally have seen counterfeit plastic pneumatic parts from South Korea, high pressure hydraulic steel hose fittings, marked with a well-known company name and logo, built of substandard metal, packed in plastic-fiber reinforced bags marked “rice” in Taiwan. It is everywhere – and only the trained eye can find it.
At Waymark, a major portion of our work involves assisting clients in evaluating suppliers, assessments of vendor manufacturing and laboratory capabilities, as well as knowing how to develop overseas partnerships that are trustworthy. After all, we have over 30 years of doing this work, of spending countless hours in production facilities all over the world, and truly knowing what is good quality versus what is perhaps a dubious, substandard operation. And we live throughout Asia-Pacific, work in Asia, not merely stopping in periodically for a look around.
I vividly recall in my previous Fortune 500 employer’s South Korean manufacturing plant that made hydraulic hose for critical high pressure applications, an episode in which they consciously mislabeled rubber products as “Made in U.S.A.” as opposed to actual manufacturing of Korean origin, simply due to the fact that at that time such Korean made product were unfairly seen as of poorer quality in Chinese markets. The parent company had solid corporate global design engineering standards in place, so that any product made anywhere in the world had identical quality in design, manufacturing, testing, and materials. But the internal system broke down due to cultural nuances and ethical lapses. At the risk of losing face (which the Korean general manger in fact did…) I had to intervene and forcefully stop production. I was not a popular guy for that effort, but then again, lives could have been at stake. And that was not the first, or last example.
As our website says, we become the client’s extra set of “eyes and ears,” on site constantly if necessary, and unlike so many vendor sourcing services available, we have technical backgrounds, speak the languages, understand factory floor operations, and consistently gauge what is happening – not just seeing things spruced up for the visitors – then it’s back to bad practices once the end-customer of the supplier is gone. There is way too much of that going on throughout Asia, including counterfeiting of brand name products and as already mentioned, materials substitutions of suspect quality. It happens every day, and we are there to prevent this from happening to you. It’s our job!