Why Third-Party Quality Inspector Rarely Provides Corrective Actions

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Imagine that you decide to hire a third-party quality inspector to check the quality of your products before the factory ships them. you created a detail inspection checklist including AQL Sample size, on-site testings, defect classification, and the QC company reports lots of defects on your products, and need corrective actions to fix them before shipping. (More about Inspection sample report)

What can you do to remedy these issues?

You may think like normal importers that your quality inspector’s duty is to work closely with factory staff,  the job is to find out corrective actions and fix these problems at the source. But generally,  this isn’t the case. In fact, this belief that a quality inspector’s role extends beyond simply finding and reporting problems.

The reality is: third-party inspection company rarely works with your supplier staff to find out corrective actions and fix the issues. So what’s stopping them? ability? or cost issue? but why do importers continue to rely on QC company to manage the quality of their shipments, despite this limitation? Let’s jump into why quality inspector does not typically offer remedies to quality control problems and discover how they really benefit importers.

A: Why QC inspection doesn’t directly solve your quality problems

Product inspection isn’t product manufacturing, you can’t offload all your manufacturing concerns to a QC company and expect them to solve all of the problems at your supplier’s workshop, Professional quality inspectors are also limited in both their authority and scope of knowledge. Whether you’ve hired a third-party inspection company, full-time inspector or you’re travelling from abroad to conduct the inspection yourself, inspection has its limitations.

Quality inspectors aren’t qualified in root cause analysis, they aren’t Quality Analyst in the factory. they usually lack the expertise needed to pinpoint the exact problem and advise the best solution. That is outside the capabilities of a typical quality inspector.

Even if the experienced quality inspector was able to find the root cause for problems and advise the solution, do you think the factory will rework the shipment 100% accordingly based on the inspector’s comments? 

B: Quality inspectors can’t tell factory staff what to do

We all know that working with a factory, to actually address any problems found during inspection requires cooperation from factory management and staff. And corrective actions, including product rework or any replacement, usually comes at a cost to the factory owner.

The factory often needs to use more product parts & materials, as well as occupying production equipment and workers in the process. Depending on how valued you are as a customer, it can be difficult to get your Chinese supplier to comply.

But it’s typically much less likely that your supplier will comply with a similar request from outside inspection staff.

Third-party inspection and other outside quality inspectors have no real authority to dictate how a factory operates its internal process. These staff often limited to only visiting certain areas in a factory and reporting on certain aspects of production, It’s also common for factory staff to prohibit certain on-site tests you may have asked your inspectors to perform, though you have created an inspection checklist for your inspectors.

A factory’s own internal quality inspector can and sometimes do dictate changes on the production line. They’re normally separate from ordinary line workers and report to a manager that has the authority to halt production. But most importers don’t rely on these staff for inspection, due to a usual lack of transparency and the risk of biased and unreliable reporting to the importer.

Anyway, That’s why Third-party Quality inspectors rarely provide Corrective Actions, you also less to see these corrective actions from third-party inspection reports.

Now here is the question that we will discuss in later articles:

How quality inspector actually helps you solve quality problems? what’s third party inspection?

Related: What A Quality Inspector Will Do In A Quality Inspection?