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A Quick Trip to China
At MLE supporting our clients is paramount even when we gets requests such as ‘can you go to China next week' we like to think the answer will always be yes, although we did say this time that it depends on the Chinese Embassy and the small matter of Visas!
After lots of rushing around, dusting off passports, filling in forms and two trips to London, the Visas were painlessly issued and we were ready to go. Andrew Redman of Realise Design was accompanying me. Realise are one of our key mechanical design partners so when a client needs mechanical as well as electronics design we can provide the full service.
After 3 flights (one to Paris to meet up with our client) we arrived in Wenzhou one of China's main manufacturing areas. A quick stop at the hotel and we were off to visit a miniature motor manufacturer. The plant was impressive - they output a motor every 3 seconds! The manufacturing process although automated in places relies heavily on manual labour - there were literally thousand of people moulding, punching, stamping, forming, soldering and testing, packing and designing. The production lines were highly organised following 6 sigma manufacturing control processes.
After a successful design meeting (I'd love to tell you about the product but I can't) we visited some consumer product manufacturers. Now these were at the other end of the spectrum - nice business like facades but internally not much to look at - massive empty factories with a few benches and boxes of parts everywhere. After much ‘polite' conversation and giggling at some of the more ‘unusual' consumer products we made our excuses and headed off for a nice meal of ...chickens feet, sea cucumber and MOUO (meat of unknown origin)!
A great trip for us and an even better trip for our client because we were able to communicate first hand our designs to the potential partners - all communication barriers were broken down and there was much sketching, hand gesturing and nods of agreement all round!
By Paul
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