First Three Weeks

One might think that business is business no matter where you are. That might be true to an extent, but culture and monetary circumstances have a big impact on how business is done. I’ve been in China now for three weeks working with factories on quality control and also trying to find suppliers for new projects. Much of what I have experienced is not what I expected. My expectations however were set in place by my western education and by some previous experience in China.I am currently studying mechanical engineering and have learned about many processes used in manufacturing.  I have also been to China to study about globalization and its effects. During my study I was able to visit various factories in Shanghai and other large cities. These factories were very well maintained and manufactured products like laptops and automobiles. This experience, combined with my education on the latest manufacturing processes, gave me a false expectation of the factories that I am currently working with. During the interview process for my current position I was told that I would be working on small projects, but I failed to realize the large difference in manufacturing conditions.During my first quality control visit to a factory here in Shenzhen I expected to see a fair amount of automation. While there were machines that performed what a person couldn’t, I was surprised to see the amount of labor required for the product. The machines’ accuracies were highly influenced by the operator’s ability to position the next product in the correct position. The operators did just that very well most of the time, but often the materials they worked with weren’t perfect which caused inaccuracies. This made my assignment to do quality control harder because there always seemed to be things that were wrong and often it was not because of the current step, but rather an earlier one.My expectations received another shock when I went to a factory that had no machinery. This factory was used for the beginning steps of the packaging process. The product they were working on required that several hundred pieces of an item be put in a bag. It would have taken too long to count each item since tens of thousands of these bags had to be done. So they weighed the bags using simple digital scales to see if each had the right amount. This was a smart way to speed the process up but it did once again cause some inaccuracies in the packaging. I quickly realized that I would not be working with the type of factories that I had learned about in my classes and that I needed to change my way thinking.Understanding the process that is being used by a factory and the limitations that are imposed by that process has been extremely important while doing quality control. As I continue to better understand these processes I am able to focus on the parts of the product that are more likely to have problems. This also plays a large part when trying to get the factory to fix problems. Often factories will say that they can’t get 100% accuracy because of their limitations but by understanding those limitations you can work with the factory to solve the problems.While finding suppliers for new projects I ran into some interesting things that have made me reflect on modern Chinese culture. The first thing that I noticed was the ability of my contacts to use English. I used emails and instant messaging to make my contacts and communicate. It seemed that everyone had English that I could easily understand, sometimes I actually had to look up terms they used. China is really trying to grasp English and many factories have hired employees that make them accessible to foreign business. I was even given an option between Chinese and English when I called my cell phone’s service provider. Still my time in factories is always spent speaking Chinese.While English might be used to do business with foreigners, Chinese culture is still present. The Chinese cultural idea of guanxi or relationships has a significant impact in Chinese business. I got a glimpse of this while instant messaging a factory. In my initial search I had missed the fact that this factory had a minimum order quantity, or MOQ, that was a bit larger than what we were looking for. When I made the comment to him that our order wouldn’t be large enough to fill his MOQ he told me not to worry about it because it was our first time working together and he wanted to be friends. I took this as him trying to build guanxi with our company by going out of his way to see if he could help us fulfill our needs. Some other factories also wanted to know a little about me personally which must be the same thing. I don’t know how business is generally done in the US but the friendly attitudes of the factories made me feel more at ease while working with them.Overall, China has been a great place to work. It gets frustrating when I can’t understand what people are saying due to any number of reasons but those instances get less frequent as I try to study things I’ve heard.  China is not the easiest place to just jump in and do business but it is possible, you just have to work at it.________________________________________________Eric Luker is currently working for SRI and finishing his degree in Mechanical Engineering at Brigham Young University.  He is fluent in Chinese and has worked and studied in both Taiwan and Mainland China.