No matter what your level of experience, sourcing from China will present many challenges, as well as opportunities. Sourcing agents in China play an extremely important role in many companies that buy from China directly.
Why?
Because a high-quality supplier network is one of the most important building stones of your supply chain structure. Identifying high quality manufacturers and integrating them into your supply chain is a very important job.
I mean, we all know what happens when you work with a manufacturer that lacks the technical capabilities, the capacity, the financial strength, the communication skills, enough people, etc.
We also know what happens when there is no chemistry between the manufacturer and the buyer. There is a constant expectations misalignment which leads to a lot of frustration and even loss of trust.
This makes the function that sources factories an important function, and if you don’t have the right resources inhouse, at one point or another, you may want to think about outsourcing this job to sourcing agents in China.
Of course, outsourcing this job to Sourcing agents in China will only work if the sourcing agents are professional and their company DNA is compatible with yours.
Not sure what does that mean?
In this post, I am going to talk about what makes a good sourcing agent in China and how to find them.
What makes a sourcing agent good?
China market knowledgeThere are many variables that influence the successful processing of a production order. Some influence the specific order being processed and some influence the entire market.
First and foremost, sourcing agents in China have to know how things work in the China market in general, and how they work in any specific industry, the sourcing agent is involved in.
For example, they need to know how logistics in China works, what are the implications of factories being located in any specific area in China, what kind of constraints different laws impose in different kinds of situations.
All these can make certain factories in certain circumstances strong candidates or irrelevant options and a good sourcing agent should bring all these into consideration.
Industry knowledge
The same way things work in a certain way in the China market level, there is also a way things are being done within each industry. Different industries require people with different expertise and skills. Some expertise and skills are easy to find. Others are more difficult. Good sourcing agents are aware of this kind of resource shortage and know how to discuss this issue with manufacturers and learn whether they have enough people with the right skills.
Another area where industry knowledge may become important is geography. In China, certain areas are known to have certain strengths and weaknesses when it comes to specific products. For example, in the injection molding industry the south of China is known to produce high precision molds, whereas the east of China is better known for its large and lower cost molds. Having this kind of knowledge, a sourcing agent will know where there is a higher chance to find a suitable manufacturer based on the specific needs of each buyer.
An existing network of professionals in relevant fields.
I often hear buyers that look for sourcing agents “that know a lot of factories”. I also come across many sourcing agents that promise their clients an “abundant pool of strong manufacturer”.
Don’t get me wrong, it is great if a sourcing agent happens to know that one of the manufacturers they already know are suitable for a client and are available to take their order.
That can happen on a regular basis only if:
1. The sourcing agent is dealing with a very specific industry and
2. Offers the same manufacturers to all their clients and erode their customers competitiveness.
Reality is very dynamic. And in China even more so. For all sorts of reasons, good manufacturers lose their advantage (and even go out of business) and new players emerge and become very attractive vendors. It is impossible to have an updated list of all competitive suppliers at any given point of time.
Good sourcing agents are good at sourcing. They are able to source good manufacturers for a wide range of products at a short time.
Part of the reason why they can do that is because they have a network of professional that work in the industries they are involved in. Quality control inspectors who visit many factories, manufacturing facilities auditors, suppliers of raw materials are only few examples of people who are updating themselves on a regular basis with changes of industry players.
Being in touch with these kind of people is an excellent way to get updated information about the most current situation of a large number of manufacturers.
Technical proficiency
Good sourcing agents make sure that their team include capable and experience technical people. During the process of sourcing manufacturers many questions are being raised by the manufacturers and the buyer with regards to how exactly the product should be made, or why initial prices are higher or lower than the buyers target price.
Many of the questions are a result of common misunderstandings related to initial stages of communication. Having technical people with good communication skills on board are a great way for the sourcing company to answer these questions and bridge any gaps.
Process
Finding suitable manufactures is very much like looking for a needle in a hay stack.
To make the search process as efficient as possible, sourcing agents must work according to a process that helps them disqualify unsuitable candidates as quickly as possible and with the smallest effort and time investment. If not, it will take them too long before they find a reasonable supplier and the process will be so expensive, their customers won’t be able to afford it.
Production orders management experience
Many times, a supplier is suitable because they are in a better position to solve problems relevant to a specific buyer.
A good sourcing agent should be able to forecast this kind of problems and they can only do that if they have experience managing production orders themselves. It could be that they have experience as production line managers or experience as third party vendor managers following up production orders. But in any case, they need to know in great details what can go wrong during production and how to get ready for it and resolve any issues that may arise.
They need to be good for you
The same way man and woman have to be compatible in their personalities for their relationship to work, buyers and their sourcing agents must be compatible too.
First of all, the sourcing agent must understand you and your company. They should know what market you are serving and what does that mean about your product and the service level your customers require.
Second, the sourcing agent must understand your organizations culture, or the way you are doing things. If your company is a very flexible and can adopt change very quickly in order to shorten time tables, a rigid sourcing agent that works strictly by the book, no matter what, may slow you down and will frustrate you.
3 best ways to find a good sourcing agent in China
References from people who work in your industryWhen you get recommendations from friends and peers it is very reassuring. At the very least you know that someone you trust had a good experience with a certain service provider.
However, out network of friends and colleagues is as big as it is, and we cannot be sure, that at any point of time, we will receive information about the service provider we need.
For this reason we need to have access to information beyond our immediate network.
References from your other service providers
You’ll be amazed how service providers of totally different industries are working together and referring customers to one another.
As a production and supply chain service provider, our customers are usually outsourcing their production to Chinese manufacturers and ship them overseas.
As such companies, besides our service, they need other services we do not provide, such as legal services, custom brokerage, freight, air travel related services and many more.
We would like to help our customers as much as we can, and when they ask us to give them a service that is out of our scope we refer them to a service provider who is proficient at giving that service.
In the very same way we get referrals from lawyers, logistics companies and travel agents. We always keep in touch with the same service providers as we want to make sure our customer have positive experiences with all the people we refer them to.
Good old Google
This is the hardest way to look for sourcing agents, but it will give you the highest amount of choices.
Good sourcing agents want their customers to know they are reliable and professional. For this reason they will post on the web information in the form of posts and articles, and make it easy for you to find it using intuitive search words, so it will be easy for you to decide that they are the right agent for you.
Try to key in to google search box the following terms:
“Best sourcing agent in China”
“Outsourcing to China strategies”
“China buying agent”
“China manufacturing agent”
“Buy from China direct”
“China direct sourcing”
You will find that many of the search results are either published by the same companies or published by organizations that are not sourcing agents (such as news companies and sellers of products rather than sellers of services).
For this reason we suggest you will not stop at the first search results page.
Scan at least five or six result pages and explore all information published by relevant service providers.
Contact us for your china sourcing projects in China.
