The How and Why to Visit Your Foreign Factory

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Visit Your Overseas Factories

One of the things my law firm’s international manufacturing lawyers always tell our clients is to visit their overseas factories, if at all possible.

Factory Visits Show You Care

Such a trip is critical for the following four reasons:

Visiting your foreign factory emphasizes that you care. Why should your factory care if it doesn’t believe you care?
Visiting your foreign factory makes you a human being, not just a purchase order. This decreases your chance of getting bad or late products.
Visiting your foreign factory is a great opportunity to see and work on product quality.
The value of what you learn from such a trip will exceed the cost of taking it.

The Benefits of Factory Visits

Companies that visit their factories have fewer factory problems than those that don’t. Now before you challenge this, note that we as international manufacturing attorneys do not make a penny more from our clients that make these visits. In fact, we make less, and yet here we are making clear how important this is.

I have had countless clients go on and on about how much they learned from visiting their factories, but literally not one single person has ever told me they regretted having made such a visit — not even those whose visits convinced them to cut ties with their existing factory.

How to Maximize the Value of Your Factory Visits

The most important thing you should do on your factory visit is to spend time getting to know your foreign counterparts as this is what will help you down the road. This is also a great opportunity for you to see what your factory can do. Can it make your next generation widget, or should you be looking elsewhere? Does your factory look efficient, or does it look like it has no clue? Does it look and feel financially healthy, or should you be concerned about your next order? Chinese manufacutring companies are shutting down left and right so you should look closely at this.