Proprietary reporting from our Asian hubs: the state of supply

We publish exclusive quarterly reports on the state of supply, based on data collected directly by our field auditors in Xi'an (China) and Coimbatore (India).

Most supply chain reports are built from surveys and desk research. Ours start from the factory floor: every quarter our teams in China and India visit suppliers, inspect production before shipment and track orders against their promised dates. This report summarises what those visits showed.

Lead times remained the main source of risk this quarter. Where orders slipped, the cause was rarely a single failure. More often it was a chain of small delays, such as a late raw-material delivery, a tooling change or a missed internal inspection, that no one saw from a distance until the shipment date had already passed.

Quality issues followed a similar pattern. The defects we intercepted at pre-shipment inspection were mostly documentation and conformity gaps rather than gross manufacturing errors: drawings interpreted differently, tolerances not checked on the final batch, packaging that did not protect the part. Each is simple to fix on site and expensive to fix once the container has left.

This is why we insist on an on-site inspection before the supplier is paid in full. It turns quality control from a hope into a condition of payment, and it gives the buyer in Italy a live photo and video report of the batch before it ships.

In the next edition we will add a comparison between the two hubs and a closer look at logistics costs. If you source from China or India and want to know how your suppliers compare, the Value Chain Health Audit is the fastest way to find out.