Quote:
Originally Posted by Sassicaia
I put my money where my mouth is, and id say almost everything is coming from the country or origin, or rather where the development started, and was proven to be successful before going overseas.
Being an educated buyer does not make me prejudice. I know you may have a personal agenda with that remark, but im not waiving one flag from one country over another. In some cases the best country for production is Sweden, Canada, Japan or the USA.
I have personal experience working close with a product manager that was responsible for moving the manufacturing of high end product originally made and designed in the USA to China. As previously mentioned it wasn't un heard of that 30% of the product that arrived did not meet spec after that move. A team of people needed to check every product that came through to catch the errors. I asked what happens when stuff slips through and he said "it woudn't matter if it all slipped through. We'd will still make more money even if we had to replace all 30% of the defective product"
I'm a big skier/snowboarder and used to only buy Hestra gloves that were originally design and made in Sweden. As soon as they made their stuff in China I noticed immediately QC issues such as stitching coming apart, bigger variances in colours that should be the same etc.
Remember Webber BBQs once a proud american made product? Now all made in china you can tell its simply a cheaper product.
Classe Audio used to be hand made in Canada, before being sent ver to china. I have stuff thats 15 years old that has never had a single issue vs the stuff 4 years old after being made in china that has needed to be replaced twice. This is stuff that costs 5-10k per piece!
As I said I put my money where my mouth is and pay the premium when ever I can. Dishwashers, vacuums, furniture, lighting, electronics this list goes on and on. I never get the made in china (or overseas equivalent) when purchasing. Ill never support the outsourced option, and this comes from experience. I tend to research and lean towards buying best in class, so I do research before making a purchase.
On the issue of "prejudice" i will come clean that there is an element in my buying decisions where I don't want to send my money to countries where I disagree with their human/animal rights standards, or general respect for our planet. If that makes me prejudice then so be it.
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I have to say that you have presented a strong argument in this posting, and much of it is true from the consumer perspective. Growing up in a manufacturing family, I had similar experience with Chinese factory management. Our product quality initially decreased as we moved our manufacturing to China. The key to address the problem was to be hands-on and to find someone who cares about quality as much as we did to manage the quality control. Once we were able to do that, our quality was back on track.
The product quality variance can be most obvious in hand-made products because the quality for those products do vary depending on the experience and skill of the workforce. In BMW's case though, based on my tour of the Munich plant, I can say over 80% of the 3 series is built by robots, from windshield installment to color painting with no human intervention. It's such an eye opener for me coming from a manufacturing plant that uses 100% human to make products. From what I saw I think majority of the BMW employees at that plant are robotic engineers who can program and fix the robots but would be at lost if they have to manually put a BMW car together. In today's automobile manufacturing plants that can pretty much be a showcase for robotic ingenuity, does the country of origin really matters? Do the same robots that perform same tasks function differently just because now the robots are in Mexico instead of Germany?
I am sure in the beginning there will be unforeseen issues that need to be addressed. I am a true believer of a robust quality control process being the utmost significant factor in success. BMW needs to drive the quality control standard to the same level as their other plants in Germany and in South-Africa. I hope BMW is more than 100% invested to make the new Mexico plant successful, especially with all the negative press and bias that are associated with Mexico-made cars so far.