History of Third-party subcontracting inspection service

Last 1980s, China started reforming and opening-up to the word, with advantage of huge population and cheap labor force, oversea purchases were coming in rapidly, at that time, China was still at first stage of developing, most of Chinese manufacturers were being short of sense of quality, extreme poor quality products, however cheap they are, went to the markets all over the world, but customers had found tons of quality issues, such as received goods not the products they ordered, qualities, even sometimes the quantity not matched up with their placed order, it caused tremendous number of claims, removals, recalls and destruction, Made in China became obtaining a reputation of poor quality, both side of trade had suffered.

To reduce trade frictions and unnecessary contract disputes, Chinese manufacturing enterprises begun to imitating the modern quality management system, meanwhile, many overseas Third-party Inspection and Testing Companies step into China and provided services for both side, Chinese product started regaining its reputation.

The role of Third-party Inspection service

Third-party inspection service means the inspection was performed by the third company between the buyer and the seller, i.e., the inspection service provided by the Third-party.

Generally speaking, Third-party inspection has 5 aspects of advantage to customer:

1. Assess the goods if comply with laws and regulations of destination country.

2. Make on-site inspection before ex-work, can remind customers at earliest stage of poor quality and delayed shipment, save time for customers to address the situation and take remedial steps.

3. Reduce the risk of claims and bans by local authorities, due to unqualified products.

4. Reduce or avoid the loss of consumer complaints, returns and business reputation caused by poor quality.

5. Verify the quality and quantity of goods in advance, avoid disputes afterwards.

All Third-party inspection company will submit a detailed report after their inspection completed, all findings will be listed, such as critical issue, major issue, minor issue and other notifications. Escort Cat for example, inspectors will step by step check each term, then classify discrepancies come to a conclusion on their report, which can help customer understand the truly situation, and help make decision either accept or at a discount, so inspection report will have a great impact here.

Some customer may have special requirements, such as function test, or special designed characters, or other specifications, they want inspector to know where are their really concerned key points, while others are not. But every Third-party inspector have to follow their own SOP (Standard Operation Procedure), can’t cover all aspects if inspector was not instructed, so communication is very important before inspection placed.

Third-party inspection is different service from Third-party test, the former need assign inspectors to do visual check at manufacturing site, according to customer approved sample and documentary materials, the goal is to check mass product if meet with quality standard or not, so the expense is counted how much manpower needed. While Third-party test need to be done in   laboratory, several samples were drawn randomly and measured by instruments in laboratory, so the expense depends how much kinds of test have been done and how complicated it is. In fact, Third-party service include inspection, test and audit, which is an one-stop service and an international practice, generally used by more and more customers around the world.

New Trend of Third-party Inspection

Third-party inspection and test is a kind of outsourcing that Chinese authorities encouraged, by the trend of "Internet +", new mode of the "Internet + inspection & audit" occurred and is becoming more and more popular.

Internet is changing our life rapidly, e-commerce has invaded most of traditional market, which suffered great change in recent years, It has become the main factor of third-party inspection mode. Because of the particularity of team building, e-commerce focuses on marketing and product development, while the quality of products is relatively weak, the third-party companies just make up for this shortage of e-commerce. The market division of labor is becoming more and more detailed, coupled with the increase in human costs, personnel training and other factors, the traditional manufacturing industry began to outsource its quality control business to third parties.

In order to survive from this new trend, Escort-Cat established new mode of third-party inspection just in time, it has integrated professional QC inspectors located all around China into Escort-Cat platform, localized service not only reduces the cost of inspection, but also achieves the purpose of quality control quickly and reliably. By effectively integrating resources, Escort-Cat Platform built a bridge of trust between excellent inspectors and customers.