CLI Inspection is a Chinese third-party inspection company whose main business is consumer goods inspection. Based on the daily practice of third-party inspection services provided by CLI Inspection Company for importers, this paper illustrates the necessity of China inspection services in international trade by discussing the importers’ demand for China inspection service, the content of China inspection service, the type and characters of third party inspection reports.
Macroscopically speaking, TPI is an independent third party (such as a full-time supervision and inspection institution) who is placed outside the interests of buying and selling, and carries out the commodity conformity inspection and recognition activities as a fair, fair and authoritative non-party according to relevant laws, standards, contracts and other basis recognized by both parties.
Therefore, the scope of these definitions and processes mentioned above is narrowed, and the inspection service below only refers to the third-party inspection service of consumer goods. The inspection service in China only refers to the companies or quality consulting institutions that provide third-party quality inspection services of consumer goods for cross-border importers in China. The target customers only refer to various commercial entities that conduct cross-border trade of consumer goods in international trade.
China Inspection Service
Understanding the needs of importers is the first step to understand China inspection service
The demand for quality control of large supermarket chains in Europe and America is supplemented by inspection and mainly by lab testing. These super-large multinational companies are huge in size, and they cooperate with super-large factories and traders for a long time. Such super-large factories and traders have strong quality awareness, strict quality control and good product quality. Therefore, the inspection focuses on the internal quality of laboratory testing, which is expensive, but for such super-large companies, they can afford it, in order to prevent product problems and complaints, which will cause the Group’s international reputation.
Small and medium-sized importers, online sellers, give priority to product inspection, supplemented by laboratory testing. These small and medium-sized importers have small business scale, low purchase order quantity and value, and usually have their own sales channels, physical stores and online stores or Amazon stores. These importers have average bargaining power with suppliers and cannot get good prices from large supplier factories. They have to get goods from small traders or factories. They need to buy products with high cost performance, instead of high price and high quality. Moreover, they hope to continue to develop the supply chain of B+ or even A- products at B- price. They need to continuously improve the quality management level of the supply chain. However, the day is not as good as expected. Small factories have smaller customers, average factory quality control, poor economic benefits, poor workers’ treatment, and old workers can’t keep stable. As a result, workers’ mobility is high, production equipment is relatively backward, and product quality is often not guaranteed. Therefore, importers’ demand for supplier quality control and product quality improvement is more urgent, and they need better third-party inspection services. First, they can restrict factories; second, they can ensure that there is no batch problem, and laboratory tests are expensive, they choose not to do the testing, unless they are special products or target market governments have mandatory requirements.
What are the types of companies providing China inspection service in China, and what are their characteristics?
Super-large companies such as SGS and ITS have high quotation for product quality control, mainly due to high lab testing fees. Because these established multinational third-party inspection companies have a history of hundreds of years and have international fame, they all serve large international importers with a history of 100 years and have long cooperation time. According to SGS 2019 financial report, 90% of SGS profits come from laboratory testing, not inspection. Their development strategy is turning to the field of higher value-added services. However, the inspection service is mainly driven by people, and the added value is relatively low, so the inspection service is not highly valued, and the inspection service is reserved only to ensure the integrity of the service.
The inspection of international large-scale third-party inspection companies is generally as follows: novice inspectors will be trained for three months to take up their posts directly and inspect the goods independently, because all the trading companies undertaking the stores will place orders in large factories, and there will not be much problem in general quality. However, if the products fail to pass the product safety requirements of the countries and regions where they are sold, a large number of products may be recalled, and whether the products meet the statutory product safety requirements, Only by sending the product to the laboratory to finish the test can we know. Therefore, the requirement for the inspector is to do a superficial test, mainly by the inspector going to the factory site and randomly taking the test samples and sending them back to the laboratory of the third-party inspection company. This seems counterintuitive, but it is a fact.
Because the customer groups of the old-fashioned large-scale third party inspection companies all want to do laboratory tests, there is no need to do professional on site product inspection in factories, but only need to do testing samples picking and send to the laboratory, and the professional degree of the laboratory is little affected by human beings. After all, the test equipment is an objective cold machine.
This is also why, if small and medium-sized importers chose such old inspection companies to do product inspection, the cost will be very high. One reason is that the inspection cost itself is relatively high, which generally costs more than 380 US dollars per man-day. Another reason is that their service concept is to guide customers to do expensive laboratory testing.
Third-party inspection companies with about 100-200 employees in medium-sized companies have developed with the rise of the Internet, focusing on China’s export market, expanding their customers by constantly participating in Canton Fair, with high cost performance and no international popularity, focusing on inspection. Although the price is low, the price per person-day is generally about US$ 290, but the workload per person-day is low, which often requires more than two inspectors to complete the inspection work for one inspection, so as to increase the turnover.
Since the founders and management of such companies mostly advocate Internet thinking, the core competitiveness of the company is the online and offline carpet marketing of the company to obtain a large number of customers and operate the inspection business in an extensive way, completely ignoring the inherent objective laws of the inspection industry. The understanding of the third-party inspection industry is very superficial, but the company undertakes the inspection tasks of clients, sends the inspection task to inspectors, arranges inspectors to complete the inspection tasks in factories, and the inspectors issue inspection reports to clients and then collect money.
If there is a problem and the customer complains, the company will shift all the responsibilities to the inspector, simply and rudely respond to the customer and solve the problem through fines and dismissal. Therefore, the inspector has no sense of belonging in such an inspection company, and after working frequently for 1 or 2 years, he has changed jobs, resulting in a high employee’s turnover rate of the company. The inspector has changed one batch after another, whose inspection level is hovering at a low level and cannot be improved.
In order to reflect the workload and please customers, the company’s management ignored the diversification of inspection workload and asked inspectors to unconditionally complete customers’ unreasonable inspection requirements, which led to inspectors spending a lot of time on non-important things. The company’s management is mostly European and American cultural background, either professional managers or upgraded from the company’s business department, and is unfamiliar with inspection business. It is impossible to keep a dynamic balance between the customer’s third-party inspection requirements and the actual professional inspection, which leads to an abnormal inspection method, which is popular and ultimately suffers customers.
The important reason why such companies can continue to grow is that they have developed with the rise of the Internet, and they are very familiar with Internet marketing. The ability to develop new customers is greater than the ability to provide professional services to customers. The reason why the business has always developed is that the increased new customers are greater than the lost old customers, and the company’s business can continue to grow.
The price of a subminiature company is about USD 100 per person-day, and the inspection service is basically not guaranteed. The price is low, but the service quality is lower. Because the price is low, in order to save costs, the companies generally hired inspectors who have lower education and do not understand English. As long as they have done inspection work in factories, they need men to adapt to high-intensity business trips. Even some inspectors know nothing about the products they inspect. For such inspection companies, The so-called inspection is just going through the motions, and the practice of formalities. Their business routine is to attract customers through low prices, increase turnover (increase the number of working days for an inspection project) by falsely reporting workload, but let inspectors reduce workload.
Because importers generally don’t know how to inspect goods, considering the lower man-days cost, it is usually easier to accept the quotation of more than 2 man-days, so the price will naturally go up, and the quotation may be 2 man-days, but in fact, the inspector finished reading it in one day, so he took a few photos casually to write a report and patted his ass away. This kind of company requires the inspector to go to several factories for inspection a day to reduce costs and increase the turnover.
In order to complete the task, inspectors show up at the factory and take some product photos. The service quality can not be guaranteed at all, which leads to serious Customer Churn rate. However, there are always unknown importers. In order to save costs, they choose such a company. This is also the reason why they can basically maintain the company’s operation. Even some companies, with the gimmick of providing inspection services for importers, buy and sell customer information to make money after obtaining customer information, so as to increase profits. It is meaningless for importers to find such third-party inspection companies to inspect goods, and they will lose confidence in the inspection industry.
Small third-party inspection companies with a price of about US$ 200-250, whose main service target customers are small and medium-sized importers. As analyzed above, such importers have more urgent demand for supplier quality control and product quality improvement, and need better inspection services. For such third-party inspection companies, they are faced with complex product quality inspection risks. It is no exaggeration to say that to do a good job well, they need very professional process management and inspectors’ on-site management and control level.
CLI inspection belongs to this type, and CLI inspection self-positioning is the most cost-effective inspection service. Our service aim is to “make imports safer”, and the price is reasonable, at USD 238 per person-day. Inspectors are trained regularly to update their professional knowledge and enhance their service awareness. The workload is scientific and reasonable, there is no falsehood, no superficial inspection, but do inspection with deep QA testing method. The vast majority of inspection tasks are completed in one man-day. All-round control of the early, middle and late stages of inspection. CLI inspection knows well what kind of inspection services for this type of importer needs, and we are able analyze the problems from the customer’s point of view to ensure the interests of importers to the greatest extent.
China Inspection Service
What are the inspection services in China?
Taking CLI inspection as an example, this paper introduces what services are provided by third-party inspection companies in China. The services content provided by our company is comprehensive, but it focuses on the whole process quality control of product manufacturing and laboratory testing consultation. You can also go to the official website to review, and the content of the website looks intuitive.
PSI (Pre Shipment Inspection)
1. Evaluate the product if matches with product specifications, packaging, packing and marking. 2. Evaluate product for safety, design, function, appearance, and performance. 3. Assess packaging form. 4. Verify material/units if match related standards of import country.
DPI (During Production Inspection)
1. Check the quantity and monitor the production schedule. 2. Evaluate the production status during the manufacturing process 3. Evaluate the product if matches with product specifications, packaging, packing and marking. 4. Ensure the calibration and accuracy of equipment. 5. Give advices to improve product quality and minimize defects. 6. Verify material/units if match related standards of import country.
IPI (Initial Production Inspection)
1. Check the all raw material and components manufatured to meet client standards. 2. Evaluate the goods designs reliability during the initial stages. 3. Detect any production problems occurs during process during the initial stages. 4. Improve the production capacity by putting forward valuable suggestion.
CLS (Container Loading Service)
1. Record the weather, arrival time of container, container No. , truck No. 2. Check the inner & outer condition to see if there is any damage, wet, hole, peculiar smell. 3. Check the quantity of goods loaded and record the condition of outer packaging (master cartons/pallets). 4. Randomly draw and open some cartons to verify that the goods meet with clients' specification. 5. Supervise the whole loading process. 6. Seal the container with the custom's seal. 7. Record the seal No. and departure time of container.
SP(Sample Picking)
Pick the samples randomly in the factory and seal the samples and send them by express to the client or the clients' appointed institution.
Lab Consultancy
The focus is to select specific product testing items list and test item price comparison for customers.
What is the inspection service process in China?
After years of development of inspection service in China, the general service process is as follows:
- Send an email to the inspection company to inform the inspection requirements, or place an order on the website of the inspection company.
- E-mail includes: information of products for inspection provided by importers and customers, modification information, purchasing order, product specifications, inspection requirements, supplier contact information, including supplier name, factory address, inspection date and contact information.
- Relevant information confirmation: factory, inspection date and inspection address, etc.
- Arrange inspectors to the factory for product quality inspection.
- The office staff of the inspection company shall review the inspection report and send it to the customer.
- Customer payment.
Significance of inspection report in China inspection service?
Taking the work practice of CLI inspection as an example, we believe that,for importers’ customers, the inspection report carries the contents of China inspection service in written form, and a detailed and illustrated inspection report enables importers’ customers to have a clear understanding of the quality of bulk products when reading the inspection report, and based on this, importers easily decide whether to notify the factory to arrange shipment or not.
The content section of the inspection report mainly includes: basic information of products and orders, inspection scheme, inspection conditions, evaluation of product quality status, what product tests the inspector has done on site, quality requirements concerned by customers, what result that the inspector has performed in place on site, and pictures of products.
For the inspection company, by reviewing the inspection report, we can further have a deeper understanding of the quality of products produced by the factory from a technical point of view. Generally speaking, we can summarize the gains and losses of the inspector’s work at that time. Because the inspection work is based on random sampling and there are various factors affecting the inspection, CLI inspection believes that the inspection work always needs continuous improvement and optimization. Most importers’ customers tend to buy products from one factory for many times. Therefore, the professional inspection report is helpful for the customer’s improvement of work quality.
What are the characteristics and causes of typical third-party inspection reports?
The inspection report can reflect the inspection level of the company to a certain extent, but different company inspection reports have their own characteristics, which often have historical reasons.
Large companies are simple (with few pictures), because these old third-party inspection companies have a history of hundreds of years, and their business processes were formed in the 20th century. With the invention of electricity, transnational trade developed greatly. At that time, international trade was mainly based on telephone and fax communication, so the inspection company’s report was usually 3-5 pages without pictures.
Most of the company’s customers were super-large supermarkets at that time, and customers gave full authorization to these established third-party inspection companies.To a great extent, the inspection reports of these inspection companies are the key to determine whether a batch of goods are qualified or not. However, due to the objective conditions at that time, the transportation links were not very convenient. This method of introducing third-party inspection to evaluate product quality in transnational trade had obvious advantages at that time. It could promote transnational transactions and lubricate all links of transactions. Under the historical conditions at that time, it was the most advanced method. In addition, for decades, long-term cooperation and mutual trust have been used up to now.
Up to now, the format of the inspection report has changed, but the whole content has not changed in essence, which also leads to the report being simple. All the target customers tend to get used to and accept such report content and format. This is like the feeling that the old people are nostalgic to read newspapers, holding a newspaper in their hands. Older people prefer to shop in physical stores rather than online.
Therefore, if a small importer chooses the services of such an old-fashioned third-party inspection company, he will feel that he is dealing with a slow-moving and stubborn person, and he can’t hear or understand your needs. This is an inevitable result.
The photo-type (with many pictures), In the inspection process, inspector takes a lot of time to take pictures and needs a lot of time to deal with the pictures of the report, so he is perfunctory in the actual inspection work for the inspector. The general idea of this kind of inspector is “just make inspection casually, but every detail of the picture should be photographed.” Because he missed a picture, it may be an insignificant picture, he will be severely punished. .Because the customer doesn’t know much about the inspection industry, he thinks that the more pictures he reports, the more detailed his work is and the more “professional”, but this is actually putting the cart before the horse.
Because this kind of third-party inspection service provider has a general history of about 30 years, with the rise of the Internet and globalization, it has been growing and growing in the new historical trend. With the start and development of Chinese manufacturing, digital cameras, Internet and communication technologies have greatly promoted the progress of the global supply chain management system during this period.
In order to dig customers from the old inspection companies, the inspection companies developed in this period generally tried their best to advertise and develop customers in Alibaba, Made in China, global sources and Canton Fair. The main customers were small and medium importers, and in order to realize the service differentiation, they ask their inspectors to take a large number of product inspection pictures as one of the gimmicks of inspection services to please customers.
Comprehensive type (taking CLI as an example) (usually 100 pictures are inspected every time, and the report editing time is 1 hour, which is reasonable in the balance between workload control and professionalism). However, the company boss and managers of various departments were inspectors of large third party inspection companies, who are very familiar with inspection, but also know the problems existing in the inspection process of large inspection companies, and are good at summing up and finding problems, and retaining customers by providing better services than the former two.
The quotation workload of this kind of company to customers is reasonable, and the workload of inspectors is saturated in one day. Therefore, it is very important to ensure that inspectors can spend limited working time on the cutting edge on the inspection day. It is meaningless and time-consuming to take too many pictures, and the inspection work is superficial; Too few pictures were taken, and the report was not rigorous and rich.
Therefore, before the inspection, the account manager of CLI company analyzes and evaluate the difficulty of the inspection work from all aspects, it ensures that the inspector will do the work thoroughly in the factory on the inspection day.This practice will consume a lot of office labor costs, but for CLI, this is one of the key steps for CLI companies to provide customers with professional, rigorous, differentiated and targeted third-party quality inspection services.
This kind of professional quality personnel in the office carry out all-round risk management and evaluation before the inspection work, and even comprehensively control the inspection day, which is one of the fundamental reasons for the extremely low customer churn rate of CLI inspection company. The all-round control of the professional account manager in the office and the two-way pull of the inspector’s strict implementation on the spot according to the inspection plan basically ensure the effectiveness of the single-day inspection work and never become superficial.
Small company simple type (report can be completed in 15 minutes)
The profit model of the subminiature third-party inspection company has been analyzed above, so I won’t repeat it here. In order to reduce the workload of the inspector for a single order, the report of this kind of company is also very simple, because the inspector has to inspect 2-4 factories every day, and the whole workload in a single day is heavy. The inspectors of this kind of inspection company generally have junior high school education and low English level, and they only write Chinese reports, which are translated into English by the office staff. Because the report should be provided to foreign customers in English, such reports are full of confusion and become a mere formality. It is difficult to find valuable quality problems by making the perfunctory or even deceptive inspection methods for the kind of company. For importers, quality risks cannot be avoided. (please ask for CLI inspection report)
China Inspection Service
CLI Inspection's Comments and Summary
Today, when globalization is irreversible, trade between countries is getting closer and closer, China is an indispensable production end, and it is a general trend for importers to purchase China inspection services. If you want to choose a reliable Chinese third-party inspection company, the first step is to understand China inspection services. So this article analyzes in depth:
- For the inspection requirements of importers in different sizes, simply speaking, large importers choose large inspection companies, while small and medium-sized importers choose inspection companies with high cost performance;
- There are differences in the service quality of third-party inspection companies in different scales, and there are many reasons for this difference. Objectively speaking, it is related to customer groups, company positioning and profit base; Subjectively speaking, it is related to leadership background and vision, service concept and other factors;
- General process of inspection service in China;
- The characteristics of inspection reports of third-party inspection companies in different scales also reflect their service quality.
Finally, I hope readers will have a clearer and deeper understanding of China inspection service after reading this article.
This article is an original article for CLI Inspection, who is committed to providing high-quality product inspection technology and know-how sharing for global importers and retailers to make imports safer.
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