Raoul said:
I'm not sure what is meant by "cheap crappy quality" from China. Look
How much have you dealt with Chinese-made auto parts? I've had wheel
bearings that self-destruct in a few thousand miles, rotors that warp
if you look at them sideways, fuel filters that won't seal, and engine
mounts with the holes drilled with the wrong spacing, for starters. A
friend who works for an automotive brake company tested new Chinese
brake calipers, and found they leaked through the porous castings.
Here are sample postings (mostly from rec.autos.tech) I've collected
over the last few years from engineers that have had to deal with
trying to get quality products out of Chinese factories:
=========== Begin Chinese Manufacturing Anecdotes ====================
Suppliers in china.... they would cut every corner, cheat every
process, and turn out crap despite the best efforts of engineers. If it
was made when the US engineer was sitting there watching it would be
decent. A week or two after he returned home, crap again.
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Absolutely right. Without constant, step-by-step, vigilant Western
babysitting, material and process specs simply do not get followed.
Corners get cut, friend-of-friend-of-friend supply chains find profit
in supplying cheaper-than-spec materials and signing off on them as
to-spec materials, and test results and certifications get falsified.
Western "quality" is simply not present as a concept. That doesn't mean
these are bad people (I'm sure many of the political prisoners and
7-year-olds working at forced labour in China are *very* good people),
just that this is not a part of their culture. Just as the Swedes,
Germans and Swiss have a well-deserved reputation of being obsessive
about quality, other cultures are at the opposite end of the spectrum.
The Western babysitting necessary to achieve Western quality eats up
the labour savings, and thensome. The savings is gained back by
flooding the Western market with theChinese crap so that nothing else
can compete on a volume/price basis and everything *but* the crap gets
choked out of the marketplace.
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Here is a typical event in a factory located in China durring a
critical program phase, based on real events.
US Engineer: Where are the gage pins?
QC person: what? don't know.
US Engineer: The pins used to measure gaps.
QC person: ask <insert one of the three names of another chinese
worker>
Note: In china, it appears that people have three names. A formal
chinese name, A shortened chinese name, and a westernized name. All are
used interchangabily. This can be very confusing at times.
US Engineer: Where are the gage pins?
QC Person 2: Gage... don't know.
US Engineer: What's in that cabinet?
QC Person 2: Don't have key.
US Engineer: <calls security, spends alot of time finding the person
with the key>
QC Person 2: Bus Leave, time to go. <leaves for home>
US Engineer: <finally gets cabinet open, even if breaking it or picking
the lock, finding no pins>
US Engineer: <Searches for more people that might help>
QC Person 3: <spends time with engineer searching and trying to
understand what the American is looking for>
QC Person 4: <figures out what Gage Pins are, goes into a dusty corner
and pulls out the case from another locked area that takes yet more
time to find the key>
US Engineer: <Blows dust off the case, opens it, takes out brand new
pins and begins to measure parts>
US Engineer: <Reports findings and recommended action>
Basically, in china, quality checking equipment is not available. If it
is available it is locked up (and no one can use it) because someone
will steal it, or not used because it is too much effort or not even
understood. Automation, fixtures, etc are just about impossible to get,
put in use, even if the US engineer has them made and sent over. I've
got other stories concerning china, some are even more humorous.
It's hard to understand just how bad manufacturing is over there until
dealing with it personally. I know I didn't.
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Yep. This is commonplace and typical. When I was the managing
technologist for a line of headlamps, trying to get product quality,
performance and durability *UP* to the bottom of the permissible (North
American) specs, we ran into virtually the same thing again and again.
Another aspect was the tests. I'd send units for testing in a
first-world lab (North America or Europe...would've happily used one in
Japan or Australia, but there was no reason to do so), and they'd fail
spectacularly. I'd show the test results to the Chinese/Taiwanese
production people and they'd go through the motions of listening and
taking notes. The "fix" was invariably to produce their own "tests",
which the same lamps would pass with flying colours. Product won't pass
the test? Cheat on the test. That's how it was done.
It is a good point that management shares a hefty chunk of the blame
here, for pretending not to see the realities behind 3rd-world
manufacturing's attractive facade of low cost. It was flatly not
possible to get the needed quality or performance in this product with
the
Chinese/Taiwanese producers, and despite being shown this in
painstaking detail, management would not authorize a re-shop of
production and instead moved to submit the falsified tests to the
government and the buyer as certifiaction documents. This was
inconsistent with my own ethics, so I resigned the position.
The lamps are on the market.
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Product won't pass the test? Cheat on the test.
That's how it was done.
I've seen that, but I can also one up it. They can't follow test
instructions either. I delt with a reliability lab in china and one on
sight where I worked. We had a running joke about the <chinese city>
factor. Multiply the number of failures in the US lab by X and that is
the greater number of failures found in China lab. Why? It has to do
with internal politics where they were trying to get a design center
there and the product was designed in the US. Products designed in Asia
would have a huge number of failures in the US lab, but passed in
china. I knew the testing engineer well and he was extremely consistant
with his method. Having personally watched the tests myself as well.
Dealing with it day in day out, I was just glad we weren't making any
thing safety related and had to make fun of it just to get through the
day.
Once one of the 'don't have the key' road block people visited our
facility for some reason. One of the engineers in the group treated him
the same way when presented with a locked cabinet. It was too funny.
Guy from the China factory didn't even get it.
Also, I spent quite a bit of time living/working in both China and Hong
Kong and the stories about the non-existent QC and systemic fudging of
test/quality data are sadly true. Short of packing up and leaving, the
foreign investor/buyer has little recourse as the court systems in
China are a complete and utter sham. I suspect this quality issue
isn't going to go away until there is some semblance of accountability
in the country. Without even the window dressings of a usable court
system, this just isn't going to happen.
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In my former engineering group this stuff became running jokes. For
plastic resins we would make fun of the chinese molders and their
claims of two resins being the 'same thing'. All their inspection
reports weren't even worth reading. I got yelled at once for repeating
another engineer's saying that they have a tolerance wheel. The parts
don't get mesured, they just have a wheel of in-spec values and spin it
to produce their quality reports. Lies all lies in those reports, not
even worth the paper they were written on most of the time. Standing
up and demanding that they get parts in spec in critical areas is only
politically damaging to the design engineer in a large US corporation.
A job is a job in china. It's not like they are going to get fired. Use
a mind set of being extremely underpaid, no hope of advancement, being
shot or imprisoned for speaking up, and there you have it. The culture
where crap is produced. It happens in similiar fashion in US
corporations where people fear for their jobs and political appearances
so they never speak up about what they know better on.
It's what I called ledger theory. The cost of engineers babysitting and
dealing with the constant, never ending problems was on a different
ledger than the conversion costs at the factory or the part costs from
the suppliers. The result at major US corporations seems to be one of
just hiring engineers in China to do the design work. Technical
knowledege is losing value in the USA at a great rate. It's all
management that is
cared about. Someone making phone calls to have things done on time.
The fact it's crap doesn't matter.
And that's the US consumer who doesn't know the difference between
what's good and what's crap. Short-sided price based decisions.
============ End Chinese Manufacturing Anecdotes =====================
I shudder to think of what kind of "reliability" we'll see in these
Chinese cars. Probably will make those much-maligned early Hyundai
models look rock-solid in comparison!
