[Healeys] water pumps and other repro parts

[Jerry Costanzo]

I also was in the pharma industry and the FDA now has more manufacturers 
outside the US than inside.  Is the quality control there?  I doubt it 
because the inspections are infrequent.  Same in the auto parts world.  I 
happened to get the China manufacturing plants dumped on me during my career 
and found that there are multiple problems working with the issues.  #1, the 
government of China said they owned 10% of our companies there and assumed a 
management role.  They had a person on site who made sure the 10% went to 
the government.  If we rejected a lot of product, he sent a message and said 
that we would not get any more till that lot was paid for.  One of our 
directors was Chinese and he said you had to understand the culture. 
Everyone gets their 10%.  If you don't let them, they will cut the quality 
to get their 10%.  We also had some plastic injection molding done there. 
Much cheaper but the quality control was lax.  I eventually worked with an 
engineering firm in Chicago that redesigned new molds to make more parts at 
a time, therefore making the parts cheaper than China.  They went out a 
bought two injection molding machines for our products, starting producing, 
warehousing, and shipping for our 163 locations.  All at cheaper price.  As 
said by others, cheaper is not always better but if your work at it, you can 
get better and cheaper.
By the way, our company was bought by a fortune 500 company and we 
immediately sold off everything in China.
China has the opportunity to be the next Japan.  They too started with poor 
products but cleaned up the act.  I really think every country has a place 
that will produce less than quality products.  You have to set up the system 
to weed out the crap.

Jerry