Can inspection, verification and quality control be manufactured in China?
Confidence 4/5 Established practice
Quality control is the cheapest insurance in importing and the first thing buyers cut. The arithmetic is unkind: an inspection costs a few hundred dollars and a bad production run costs the whole order plus the freight, plus the customer you lose quietly. The useful question is not whether to inspect but where in the process, because inspecting before shipment cannot fix a problem created at the drawing stage. In practice the answer is almost always yes for a lawful physical product, and the useful question is which process and at what volume. For this category: Not applicable. Inspection is a service priced per day or per man-day, with a one-day minimum and travel time charged outside major manufacturing regions. Not applicable. Where fixtures or gauges are needed for verification, they are specified and charged separately.
Sources
- Pre-shipment inspection scope, pricing and AQL sampling — QIMA and SGS published service definitions
- ISO 2859-1 sampling procedures — ISO
- Supplier verification practice — QIMA supplier qualification guidance
What goes wrong with inspection, verification and quality control
- Inspecting only at the end, when design and material choices are already locked in.
- Accepting a factory's own report as independent verification.
- Skipping inspection because the order is small; small orders are where a total loss is most painful relative to turnover.
- Not defining what a defect is before the inspection, which makes the report unactionable.
- Booking an inspection after the goods are already packed and the container is loaded.
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