Can the Third Party Inspection Approval Samples Help Me Reduce the Product Quality Risk?
What is approval sample?
In international trade, when clients communicate orders with factories, factories need to provide samples to clients for approval. Both sides discuss to confirm the product details, including the product’s function, appearance and process. Finally, factories use the correct materials according to the results of the discussion to reproduce a sample as a reference for mass production. At the same time, they have the client’s signature to prove the accuracy of the sample. This is the process of the approval samples. However, some of the clients cooperated with CQI did not provide third party inspection approval samples, when placing inspection order to CQI, together with some documentation requirements and pictures of products.
During the inspection, inspectors will give priority to inspect products according to the documents provided by clients in the previous period, and then add their own professional knowledge to discover product defects.But most of CQI’s clients do provide approval samples prior to inspection proceeding.
This kind of third party inspection process is being carried out by most inspection companies.Superficially, there will not be too much problem. For most of clients who received and confirmed the approval samples, it is hard to them to have in-depth knowledge of the product’s manufacturing process and crafts. They tends to pay more attention to the function and appearance of the product, instead of products of its own. After all, whether the product can occupy a certain position in the market is the most concerned problem for the client. As for an inspector, although he has professional knowledge of different products, he is, indeed, not the one who is most familiar with the complete production process of products. Because the details of the products are manufacturing by the factory, there are tends of factors have effect on the final quality of finished products. If this is a immoral factory who cares profit much more than quality, you are almost 100% possible to get massive products that is not completely consistent with your approval samples?
Is the approval samples useful for the third party inspection?
As compared, when the client provides approval samples to third party inspection companies prior to inspection, it enables the inspector can compare the approval samples with the goods during inspection. Many clients also know about this, but do not know well about the significance of approval samples for third-party inspection. As for third party inspection companies who just superficially compare the appearance of bulk products and approval samples, and take photos. It is another kinds of “superficially inspection＂, so just keep away from this, and stop using it! As approval samples is the criteria of quality standards for both sides of international trade, but the both of sides probably have blind area of thinking. Importers care much more about appearance ( models, style, color ), prices, but supplier or manufacturers care about the manufacturing cost. Few of them keeps an eye on the quality demand of end consumers. Shortly, third party inspection company not only requires to inspect the quality of bulk as an objective third party, but also to find out possible quality problems that might give negative effects on the ones who buy from the prospective of end consumer. So Avoid Superficial Inspection is something that clients should always pay attention to, when using third-party inspection services.
For a rigorous third-party inspection company, having the approval samples provided by clients is just like having the magical weapon. Because the inspector can get the details and results of the order confirmed information between the client and the factory: what the raw materials of the products used and the production process ( if importer is enough professional,but it is not mostly). The inspector can use it to compare with the bulk samples, analyze the problems existing in the goods, and reflect them to the clients and the factory in time. It is convenient for clients to negotiate with factories for the rework or remedy actions. It helps to prevent the risk of defective products circulating to the sale market in advance. By just offering approval putting the approval sample in the factory can avoid the annoying complaints of consumers. Why not do such wonderful things?
What CQI third party inspection do after receiving the approval samples from client ?
Despite not every client provide approval samples (Golden samples) to third party inspection before inspection proceeds, we always ask clients to send us the approval samples as much as possible. It is key factor for us to give clients much better professional third party inspection services. So, we are pleasured to receive international courier (approval samples, gold samples) from clients.
In fact, it is because our QA engineers need to carry out quality risk analysis on different products. Before the pre-shipment inspection, the QA department’s technicians will conduct a comprehensive study on the approval samples sent by clients, including raw materials, processing technology, structural analysis, functional testing and most importantly, abuse testing of simulated consumers under relatively extreme conditions. These all take some time. Although inspectors are also employed through professional training, they will be negatively affected by some uncertain factors during the inspection. Such as the factory environment, like lack of workers to offer basic co-operation to move on inspection, the equipment that the factory can provide and the factory coordination, etc., it will possibly lead to negligence of one of them. However, if the inspector receives the foresight from the QA department in advance and always keeps the key points in mind for inspection. By which, it enables the inspection job much more professional.
Look at the actual case then you will understand
For a lady handbag, the inspector found that the height of the handle was different by comparing the approval sample with the bulk production. Although the diameter of the handle was the same, which satisfied the arms of ladies of different sizes.
But the position of handle is not satisfying. Does the factory just want consumers to carry it like this? Don’t the factory want to sell to fat ladies? When the client received our inspection report, he immediately asked the factory to rework all products, because he didn’t want to receive bad reviews from the consumers. What if clients are planning to set up a store on Amazon at this moment, then how to Avoid amazon’s bad reviews is probably his first consideration.
This was another lady handbag (please ignore the color difference between the two pictures, which was caused by the different light). The left picture was the goods inspected by the inspector during inspection, while the right picture was the goods received by the client after factory shipped it out. The inspection company has already informed the client in advance in the inspection report, on which there was a problem with the material of the product and it is prone to creases easily. Since the third party inspection approval samples are not provided by clients during inspection, it is impossible for us, the inspection company to know whether the factory has replaced the raw materials with inferior ones. What is more, the client say nothing about it, just a few photos of products when placing inspection order to us.
A month later, when the client received the shipment, and found that most of the products had creases on the surface, who expressed regret to us right away, and appreciated our careful and responsible work. Such problems we already mentioned on the report. But for some reason, the client still decided to let it go. Later on , the client checked the approval samples in his hands and found that there would be no creases on handbag. Speaking of which, everyone should understand that the factory cut corners. This is why we would advise clients to provide approval samples as much as possible when using third-party inspection services.
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