Manufacturing in Taiwan

This will be my fifth trip to China. On each trip I visit manufacturing plants in various cities. On this trip we stopped in Taiwan on the way to China to visit a few plants.

The contrasts between Taiwanese and Chinese manufacturing plants are interesting. Taiwan has achieved a reputation as a place from which to get high quality yet affordable machine tools and accessories (as well as many other products). China has a reputation for inexpensive machine tool accessories (as well as many other products). So what makes the difference?

I’m sure it will come as no surprise that the difference can be summed up in three words—attention to detail. While this obviously covers manufacturing practices such as quality control at each manufacturing step. It is also reflected in things like plant cleanliness and working environment.

Let’s take a look at some of the things I noticed.

The first thing I noticed when I walked into one of these Taiwanese plants was the floor. It’s painted green, not covered by many years accumulation of grease. The workers are sitting on stools and working at a bench. They are not sitting on old crates and working on the floor. They have proper tools and proper containers for the work.

This woman is deburring her work pieces. The machine behind her is processing the next part so it doesn’t take any extra time. One of China’s big economic advantages is inexpensive labor. Why can’t they use just a little of that labor to debur a part once in a while?

We saw in-process QA after most production steps. They don’t wait to find problems in the completed product. Finding problems early has several advantages. The error is easier to correct if the product does not need to be disassembled to get to the issue. And the cause can be corrected more quickly if the problem is found early.

See the binder standing up in front of this woman applying labels to the product? She does not have to rely on memory to get the correct label in the correct spot. Process control ensures that products are made correctly, order after order.

And, of course, we saw excellent quality control. The two rows of tools are statistically correct samples from batches of finished products. The open binder shows production in what a correct product should look like. The sheet in the front is a detailed inspection report. One failure in a sample of this size means the entire lot will be checked one by one.

This entire blog is one big generality—Taiwan good, China bad. Don’t believe it for a moment. To say that all Chinese factories are poorly run is simply not true. There are all levels of production in China. Some products that we get from China are more precise than the “good old” American brand. And your iPad was not made in a factory with greasy floors. China is a huge place and you can get virtually anything made there to any quality standards.