Recently, I received a special task from an existing customer, who needed me to communicate with their Chinese supplier and make sure the supplier can make the sample 100% correct! Actually, this is one of the common cases I receive from my customers to help them tackle the miscommunication issue with Chinese suppliers.

After a meeting with customer, I was informed that they had invested costly tooling and also spent more than 8 months with this supplier to develop an OEM product, however, it ends up receiving twice failure samples and still no solution, so customer felt very disappointed and had no idea how to make their supplier understand their requirement and make things right, they thought it was again language problem!  

As usual when I receive such task, I would ask for and review the relevant correspondences (as much as possible), product spec. and technical requirement, then have a deep conversation with supplier (of course in our own language- Chinese). In this case, after digging out all stories behind and I found out the root causes below:

1. there was no exact drawing provided to supplier, it was just an ideal product (draft drawing) at the very beginning, so customer did a lot of modifications base on the draft. (NO CLEAR STANDARD) 

2. all modifications were only discussed and confirmed by emails (NO SOLID PROOF)

And solutions I proposed in the next step:

1. to finalized a FINAL drawing on paper, but not remarking on draft!

2. to summarize all the required modifications on an excel file (Before vs After), with text description and relevant picture if possible.

3. to ask supplier to confirm their understanding and agreement by written. (please note that the YES answer from suppliers could be TRICKY sometimes, it might just mean “yes, I know”, but not certainly means “yes I agree with you”)

After implementing actions above, two weeks later supplier produced new samples again and eventually got approval by customer!!

Looking back at this case now, whose fault is it? And what made it so difficult? Is it really the language problem? From my view, process plays bigger than language in this case, and honestly this supplier’s English is not bad, she could understand every word, but the point was that everyone got lost in this long communication (too much information & changes), so mistake occurred naturally.

There is no secret to make things right, just to make a clear PROCESS and stick to it, then magic would happen.

P.s. if you are interested in this subject, please keep following my update.