Production follow-up and order management
An order placed is not an order followed. We handle placement, chasing, progress reports and early warning of any slip — in the factory’s language and on its time zone, while you work on yours.
- 2
- annual factory shutdowns built into the schedule from the outset
- 0h
- time difference for you: we work to your business hours
- Slippage
- flagged the moment it appears, never on the delivery date
- 01
Placement
Order formalised with the specification fixed, the payment schedule, the Incoterm and the agreed quality thresholds. What is written at this point is what can be required later.
- 02
Chasing and progress
A Chinese order book is not managed by one email a month. Regular follow-up keeps your order in its place in the queue, before a delay becomes impossible to recover.
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Alert and arbitration
Material shortage, line delay, deviation on a sample: you hear about it while correction is still possible, with the options and their consequences.
What gets lost between order and delivery
Between confirmation of an order and shipment, a dozen decisions are taken at the factory: sourcing a material, substituting an unavailable component, reordering the lines, choosing a subcontractor. None will be reported to you unless somebody asks.
Follow-up means putting those questions at the right moment, to someone reachable who is physically there. It is unspectacular, and it is what separates an order delivered as agreed from an order delivered as it came.
The Chinese calendar shapes everything
Chinese New Year falls between late January and mid-February, following the lunar calendar. Factories officially close for a week, in practice two to four, and output slows for several weeks beforehand as order books fill and suppliers prioritise their regular customers.
The restart is just as delicate — some workers do not return from their home province, and the first batches from renewed teams call for closer inspection. National Day, from 1 to 7 October, has a similar but shorter effect.
An order due before Chinese New Year is placed in the autumn. We work the schedule back from your delivery date and put those shutdowns in from the start, rather than discovering them along the way.
Holding your place in the order book
A Chinese order book is reshuffled constantly. A factory that receives a larger order, a more urgent one, or one from a longer-standing customer moves the others down — without warning, because nothing obliges it to.
Regular chasing is not a courtesy: it keeps your order visible and reminds the factory that someone is following the file. That is the difference between a delivery date held and a delay announced the day before.
Working with quality control
Production follow-up and inspection answer to each other: it is because we know where the run stands that the in-line check can be triggered at the right moment — while only part of the pieces are out and a defect can still be corrected on the rest.
The two services can be commissioned together or separately, depending on what you need.
- Order formalised
- Regular progress reports
- Deviations flagged early
- Schedule kept current
- Arbitration with the factory
- Coordinated with inspection
An order followed or an order merely placed
| Without follow-up | With follow-up on site | |
|---|---|---|
| Schedule slip | Found out on the due date | Flagged as it appears |
| Material substitution | Discovered on arrival | Settled before production |
| Place in the order book | Whatever you are given | Held by regular chasing |
| Chinese New Year | Endured | Built into the plan |
Frequently asked questions
- How often do we hear back?
- It depends on the length of production and its critical stages: a simple three-week order does not call for the same rhythm as a development running several months. We agree the rhythm at the start, and you are told immediately in the event of a deviation rather than at the next scheduled point.
- Can you follow an order already under way?
- Yes. We pick the file up as it stands, establish real progress with the factory and hand you a clear position. It is a common request once a lead time starts slipping and answers become vague.
- What do you do if the factory falls behind?
- We first find the real cause on site — material, workload, subcontracting — then the options: reordering the lines, partial shipment, a change of transport mode to recover part of the delay. You arbitrate on costed options, not on a bare announcement of delay.
A production run to follow?
Tell us where your order stands and what worries you. We pick the file up wherever it is.
Each service can be commissioned on its own, or alongside the others.