Knowing Your Manufacturer

Knowing Your Manufacturer,
is important in today’s fast product development cycles. Understanding what they bring to the table allows you to build a relationship that will create greater productivity and attention to detail for all parties. Two Key Areas is to conduct visits and regular business reviews.
Visiting Your Manufacturer
First of all visiting your manufacturer improves communication, working relationships and quality. Likewise experiencing the production of your product is an excellent way to discover what is working well, and what isn’t. As a result these visits produce new ideas and re-focuses quality around what is important to the product.
Business Reviews
A well-organized business review can help in understanding the capabilities of your manufacturer and lead to greater improvements on what they can provide to you.
Sharing information with your key partners can lead to new opportunities. You will improve quality and efficiencies by understanding business activities that surround the making of the product. Furthermore you may learn about other resources your manufacturing partner can provide such as engineering and rooting out potential problems, improved logistics and product development best practices.
Choosing A Manufacturer,
that is easily available and open to productive business reviews and factory visits increases reliability. When your manufacturer is reliable and responds to your companies’ requests by taking ownership in your process and speed to market you know you’ve made a good selection. A strong relationship with your manufacturer will eventually develop into them being viewed as an extension of your company.