This put me in mind of the importance of making sure all your business documents say what you intend them to, ESPECIALLY when doing business in a foreign language.  One of the services PassageMaker offers our clients is help drafting the language on their purchase orders.  Many of our clients come to us after having a bad experience or two in China, and it is amazing how vague some of their purchase orders are.

The Chinese legal system is rapidly improving and a properly written purchase order is a binding contract that can be the difference between getting raked over the coals and being the one doing the raking.

I see similar issues with design databases.  Drawings are often given to us with no material specifications, no finish specs, etc.  I had a drawing once from an client that specified “aluminum”.  When I asked his engineer what type, he responded that he didn’t think it mattered.  This for a part to be subjected to high heat and load stress – you’re darned tootin’ it matters.

We have also received drawings specifying titanium fasteners.  After wasting time looking for these very hard to find fasteners, the project engineer in the USA tells us that he just cut and pasted the fastener drawing and forgot to change the material spec.  Two seconds of his time would have saved two days of our team’s time.

This kind of BS is why we have Endorsed Service Providers.  Choosing with the cheapest guy is very rarely the best deal.

Another area where we frankly NEED our clients to proofread is our Product Quality Manual (PQM), the core of our Assembly-Inspection-Packaging service.  As Mike Bellamy says, “we are generalists; we depend on the client to be the expert”.  We take the lead on drafting the PQM, and submit it to the client for approval, but once they sign off on it, that is what we are going to do, no more, no less.  It becomes our warranty and if the client forgets to tell us something, once they approve the document, that is now the official record.  We’ll happily amend the PQM for the next order, but if it wasn’t written down, not my fault.

Our system incorporates four (4) levels of approval before it is sent to the client for final approval.  From the speed at which some clients approve the document, I know they barely looked at it.  I would rather have a 17 page response as we got from one client than a signature 20 minutes later.

Doing things right takes time, but nowhere near as much time as doing things over.  If your project is valuable enough to bring to market, you have time for some proof reading.

PS – I have dyslexia, and have proof-read this damn post five times looking for typos.  I bet you all find at least one in spite of that effort.

And by this weekend, I mean most all of it, Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday morning.  Friday and Saturday were hot and humid, but Sunday was the gauntlet.  Day started early, hot and humid and ended in a cold rain at 1:00 AM Monday morning.  I had some work to do and did not get to sleep until 2:30 AM, back up at 6:00 AM to help them finish before the deadline of 9:15 AM (which we made by 5 minutes).

Why am I telling you about this, a blog ostensibly about China Business and my impressions thereof?  Two reasons:

1. I am a slightly overweight and out of shape 39 years old.  I like to drink more beer than I should and my Room 101 is a gym.  I have never been a good athlete, I have a bad back, so bad I had to wear a brace 24/7 for several years as a teenager.  And though today I am sore all over, my legs and my back feel far better than I’d expected.  I credit my TrekDesk.  I’ve mentioned TrekDesk before (here and here) and I walk several miles a day at an aggressive 8 degrees of incline at 2.2 mph, which will get your heart pumping.  I had not realized how well it had conditioned my legs and forced me to improve my posture.  Walking while you work really does rock.  I mention this because as I have blogged before, the TrekDesk is one of the best examples of our complete system of services – engineering by our Endorsed Service Provider, Contract Engineering Services; then Sourcing Feasibility Study, next Vendor Coordination and now Assembly-Inspection-Packaging at our Assembly Center according to the customer approved Product Quality Manual.
2. The USA’s trade deficit with China is almost universally viewed as a bad thing.  But the low-cost goods China provides to the USA consumer is a reminder that any transaction has benefits for both sides.  As I moved my friends’ copious amount of stuff, I was struck by how much of the contents of their home (and indeed, any American home) are now Made in China.  When I was growing up, I do not remember having that many clothes.  That is not to say I went about in rags; quite the opposite, my Father was successful and I had a wonderful childhood.  I just don’t remember having anywhere near the sheer volume of clothing my friends’ children had.  Today I have five (5) pairs of shoes.  I actually make a game of trying to minimize the amount of stuff I drag around with me – Exhibit A being the extended trips to China with one (1) carry-on bag.  Looking around my own house, each of my children has at least twice as many pairs of shoes as I do.  All are Made in China.  The prices paid for those are astoundingly low, even to me who has an idea of what they cost ExW.  While I am rightly concerned about foreign competition as an American manufacturer, it would be dishonest and foolish to say that there was no benefit to the American consumer from our trade with China.

All for today, much catch-up to do having lost the weekend.  It continues to rain soup, new opportunities daily.  Will try to squeeze in more blogging tomorrow.

This project has now transitioned to Pramod KC‘s team for production.  Pramod’s team manages the vendors (we call it Vendor Coordination / Export & Logistics) and coordinates to make sure our Assembly Center gets all components and performs Assembly-Inspection-Packaging to the customer approved Product Quality Manual.  When all is complete, our Logistics Department arranges the shipment, often shipping directly to the client’s distributors and retailers, often in customer-specific packaging, including point of sale displays and barcoding.  In short, this is not only a great product, but it is a great example of how the PassageMaker system works start to finish.

But enough about us, back to the article.  Key paragraphs:

You may think you have no choice about how much you sit. But this isn’t true. Suppose you sleep for eight hours each day, and exercise for one. That still leaves 15 hours of activities. Even if you exercise, most of the energy you burn will be burnt during these 15 hours, so weight gain is often the cumulative effect of a series of small decisions: Do you take the stairs or the elevator? Do you e-mail your colleague down the hall, or get up and go and see her? When you get home, do you potter about in the garden or sit in front of the television? Do you walk to the corner store, or drive?

Just to underscore the point that you do have a choice: a study of junior doctors doing the same job, the same week, on identical wards found that some individuals walked four times farther than others at work each day. (No one in the study was overweight; but the “long-distance” doctors were thinner than the “short-distance” doctors.)

…

But it looks as though there’s a more sinister aspect to sitting, too. Several strands of evidence suggest that there’s a “physiology of inactivity”: that when you spend long periods sitting, your body actually does things that are bad for you.

As an example, consider lipoprotein lipase. This is a molecule that plays a central role in how the body processes fats; it’s produced by many tissues, including muscles. Low levels of lipoprotein lipase are associated with a variety of health problems, including heart disease. Studies in rats show that leg muscles only produce this molecule when they are actively being flexed (for example, when the animal is standing up and ambling about). The implication is that when you sit, a crucial part of your metabolism slows down.

Nor is lipoprotein lipase the only molecule affected by muscular inactivity. Actively contracting muscles produce a whole suite of substances that have a beneficial effect on how the body uses and stores sugars and fats.

Which might explain the following result. Men who normally walk a lot (about 10,000 steps per day, as measured by a pedometer) were asked to cut back (to about 1,350 steps per day) for two weeks, by using elevators instead of stairs, driving to work instead of walking and so on. By the end of the two weeks, all of them had became worse at metabolizing sugars and fats. Their distribution of body fat had also altered — they had become fatter around the middle. Such changes are among the first steps on the road to diabetes.

…

Some people have advanced radical solutions to the sitting syndrome: replace your sit-down desk with a stand-up desk, and equip this with a slow treadmill so that you walk while you work. (Talk about pacing the office.)

Why yes, yes we have.  It feels to good to be a radical sometimes!

I have found that walking at 2.2 mph at 6 degrees of incline is just right to really get your heart rate going and still be able to type, write and talk on the phone.  So go order a TrekDesk, and if you need help bringing your product to market, give PassageMaker a call!

In order for any project to be successful, you have to freeze the design at some point.  You have to get to “good enough” and go to market.  I have seen inventors spend years tweaking a design, making changes after tooling is begun, even buying and then scrapping 1st, 2nd and even 3rd generation tooling when they have the next ‘great’ idea.  They forget that they need to actually sell something.  When they finally run out of money, often they are genuinely surprised.

PassageMaker is well versed in Vendor Coordination, especially during the critical product development phase, and our Endorsed Service Providers for design engineering know how take a sketch on a cocktail napkin and turn it into a finished design database, ready for manufacturing.  We can and do counsel our clients, but ultimately, they are the ones who have to decide when to move forward.  And creative people can sometimes be too darned creative for their own good.

The principle function of a design engineer is to recognize a dead horse and bury it promptly.

We work with inventors and innovative small businesses from around the world, and nearly all of these folks have interesting product ideas.  I love my job, as everyday is filled with creative people and their concepts.  For all intents and purposes, it’s like being head of sales for a conglomerate that makes everything from medical devices to toys.

But a good idea is not the same as a design database.  In order to proceed to tooling or manufacturing, you have to have a finished design, which is why PassageMaker has Endorsed Service Providers (ESP) for engineering.  Many of our clients need assistance to bring their great ideas to life, and while we could say “come back when you’re ready”, we’d much rather direct them to a trusted ESP to keep the project alive.

Sadly, not all ideas are good ones, and that is another area where we can help, though the client may not want it.  We’ve seen some real dogs and while I am happy to go forward if the client insists on paying, we don’t pull any punches either.  Often seeing the costs involved to bring an idea to market, even with the savings inherent in China, is the best wake up call they ever get.