Quality control for Chinese products

At the end of the 20th century, the quality control of products coming from China was not exactly at an enviable level. No parameters were defined in the evaluation of both the production and the products themselves.
Today, 20 years after Chinese imports have spread widely across the planet, business problem solving processes and analysis frameworks have been created to determine and control product consistency and quality.
Unfortunately, all over the world and especially in our area, it is not unusual for us to take the reliability and quality of products for granted even today.

Our recommendation is that if you import goods from China by container, in bulk, you should not miss this shop! You will know what to expect upon receipt of the goods, or even if it is necessary to stop the delivery of the goods while they are still in China, until the observed defects are corrected.

Misconceptions about the quality control industry are common, especially when it comes to the quality of goods coming from China. Many importers assume that they must check every component of every product before placing an order. 100 percent order verification is sometimes necessary for certain customers and high value products. But checking random sample orders is usually more cost-effective for many importers of consumer goods.
In this text, we will deal with product quality control, explain some basic terms and present how we do it.

What is quality control?

Quality has no single definition. Someone considers something beautiful, while for others it is also ugly, for someone something is good, while someone else will find a hundred flaws in the same product. Despite the relative meaning of "quality", quality control is the process by which products/services are tested and measured to ensure that they meet an appropriate standard.
Quality control is the process by which a company seeks to ensure that product quality is maintained or improved.
There are two key objectives of product quality control:

• to ensure that the products are as uniform as possible
• to minimize errors and irregularities in them

When talking about quality control, we must mention AQL.

What is the AQL standard?

AQL stands for Acceptable Quality Limit. AQL is an acceptable quality level, that is, it is a measure applied to products and defined in ISO 2859-1 as "the worst tolerable quality level". AQL tells you how many defective components are considered acceptable during random sample quality inspections.
As an importer, although the ideal acceptable level of quality is defect-free products, you may have to settle for an acceptable level of quality. AQL will help you monitor and avoid batches with unsatisfactory quality. If you and your supplier agree on an AQL of 1%, the number of defects in the supplier batch should not exceed 1%. So 10 products may be defective in a batch of 1000 products. The importer rejects the entire batch if the number of defective products is 11 or more.
Defective products above a predetermined number or percentage are known as the Rejectable Quality Limit (RQL). RQL is an unsatisfactory quality level.
It is important to note that AQL is not equal for all industries. For example, the AQL for healthcare products is more stringent because any defect poses a greater risk to the end user. AQL defects are product quality problems observed during random inspections.
They are categorized into three groups:
Critical flaws
These are serious flaws that can seriously harm the end user. Importers typically use an AQL of 0.0 for critical defects. If inspectors find one critical defect in the selected sample size, the entire order fails inspection.
Major disadvantages
These defects are less serious but are not acceptable to end users as they increase the risk of product failure. Importers usually assign an AQL standard of 2.5% to major defects.
Minor defects
These are small defects with little impact on the safety and usability of the product. Most importers use an AQL standard of 4% for minor defects. Under normal inspection, AQL levels range from 0.065 to 6.5. The higher the AQL level, the more lenient the inspection. For general inspection of consumer products, the AQL level is usually set at 2.5, which means zero tolerance for critical defects, 2.5 for major defects, and 4 for minor defects.

Three levels of AQL general inspection

There are three general levels of AQL inspection: "I", "II" and "III". Each represents the amount of sample to be inspected. The inspector generally checks the entire sample size for quality issues related to the performance, function and visual appearance of the product. Any quality defects found during inspection contribute to the overall result of "pass" or "fail".
Inspection level "I" represents the lowest level and it includes the least amount of sample of the three general levels of inspection.
Inspection level "II" is often referred to as a "normal" sample size. Level "II" is the level of inspection most often chosen by importers, since it achieves a wider scope of goods control at relatively low costs. Level "II" inspection is often particularly appropriate for the first inspection of each product series. Looking at these first batch results can help you determine if Level "II" is still appropriate or if you should increase or decrease the level of inspection.
Level "III" inspection provides the largest amount of sample for the corresponding product lot of all three levels of AQL inspection. In comparison, level "I" takes a quantity of 80 units for a batch size of 5,000 pieces, while the sample quantity of level "III" is almost four times larger at 315 pieces. This general level of inspection offers the highest scope and the highest guarantee of order status and quality with receipt of samples. Therefore, level "III" minimizes your risk of receiving a shipment with a large number of defective goods.

All of the above may be a bit confusing.
In practice it looks like this, this is how we do it:

The general conclusion is followed by a detailed overview of the control items with a description and pictures from the scene.
We hope that we have brought you a little closer and clarified the importance of product control and basic testing. If you have any question or need for inspection and control of goods in China contact us