Jade Connections provides customers with customized sourcing options, with direct quality assurance, multiple sourcing options, and local factory representation. This process involves working directly with the customer to understand their unique needs, and then matching these with specific products and one or more manufacturers capable of satisfying their needs.
Through continual research and working together with local manufacturers Jade Connections has the ability to keep abreast of both market trends as well as product manufacturing trends. This allows Jade Connections to work with customers to effectively implement a sourcing strategy covering one ore more lines, over multiple product life cycles. This process ensures that Jade Connections can provide products that best meet the customers needs, are the latest, and of best quality.
Whenever possible Jade Connections arranges for multiple suppliers ensuring that should problems arise with either products or production demands the automatic backup suppliers are already in place. This ensures a consistent and predictable flow of products. For most projects, Jade Connections staff physically visits all supplier factories to confirm production quality and capabilities.
Jade Connections private sourcing focuses on the following main areas: Product Line Development, Branding, Multiple Sourcing, and Testing / Quality Assurance.
Product Line Development
While Jade Connections is happy to assist with single item sourcing, we understand that most customers are interested in establishing a product line of similar / synergistic products. Jade Connections specializes in working with customers and manufacturers to establish products spanning one or more product lines.
As products evolve, it is necessary that the sourcing of solutions evolve to meet changing customer and market requirements. In fast moving industries such as consumer electronics, product life cycles can be as short as six months.
Through continual market research, and monitoring of manufacturing trends and changing customer requirements, Jade Connections can help ensure the latest and most appropriate products are available.
In some industries such as consumer electronics, Jade Connections actively works with the manufacturers and OEM's to ensure the highest level of interoperability across synergistic product lines.
Branding
Unless directed to do otherwise, most manufacturers will either deliver products unbundled without any packaging, or in generic non-branded packaging. If specific branding is not necessary, the generic packaging may be adequate for some customers, but not all.
Jade Connections works with both the OEM customer and manufacturer to integrate custom branded packaging into the manufacturing process. Jade Connections can assist with both custom documentation / user manuals, as well as packaging design and manufacture.
Multiple Sourcing
China produced products generally fall into one of two categories - private model or community models. Private model products are usually only produced by a single factory. Advantages of the latter approach are higher probability of unique product design, and higher attention to detail with respect to materials and the manufacturing process. Disadvantages include higher pricing, and being tied into a single source. Problems in meeting production demand in this situation can result in shortages at delivery time.
Community designs on the other hand are licensed to many factories at the same time. Each manufacturer is free to advance the design as they see necessary. Each factory is also free to utilize whatever spec components they feel best suited for their needs. This results in some factories producing devices of poor quality, while others may produce identical looking items of high quality.
Advantages to the community design approach are extreme price competition, resulting in very low priced items. In addition, as many factories produce basically the same items, it is possible to source the same item through several factories. This allows protection in case delivery volumes exceed the abilities of a single factory or in case the primary sourcing manufacturer runs into temporary production problems.
Disadvantages of the community design approach are many. The most significant is the side effect of extreme price competition. As all the designs are essentially the same, with pricing being the main product differentiator, in the eyes of the yet to be burned buyer, factories are pushed to produce at the lowest price possible, with little regard to product quality. As a result, component qualities and manufacturing processes are slashed to cut costs. The results are cheaply made goods with high failure rates and low customer satisfaction. In this case, both buyer and manufacturer are to blame - which has led to the current bad name Made in China now has.
Other issues associated with the community design items are non-uniqueness of the products. Quality standards vary widely from factory to factory, and it is common to see identical looking products from different factories, with very different internal components and in some cases software. This is generally a bad thing, as the average consumer cannot be expected to be able to know the differences and to make an informed buying decision. Instead all products tend to be labeled as rubbish.
NOTE: recent reports on community designed MP3/MP4 players places the industry wide failure rates as high as one out of every three units. Other community design product areas have similar quality problems when pricing is the only criteria used in factory selection. Basically any industry where the buyers drive the process on price ONLY will see similar results.
The negative effects of extreme price competition with community designs can be countered by close cooperation with the factories. Most manufacturers very much prefer the production of quality items - but pricing has to be flexible enough to allow the factories, already operating on small margins, to integrate proper quality components as well as to pay for proper testing and quality assurance.
Testing / Quality Assurance
For all but the most basic of items, Jade Connections as a normal part of the sourcing process evaluates product quality, component quality, manufacturing process, as well as performing basic product testing. The results of these procedures are shared with the customer in order to determine the best fit product to meet customer / market needs.
Jade Connections can also provide spot product testing as part of the acceptance process prior to final customer shipment.