Almost every day since the crazy and massive trend of Android phones started, SBE has been performing countless inspections at those manufacturers’ premises. Some of them amazingly established and some others impressively disastrous. The city of Shenzhen has always been world famous for being an electronic cluster, so an inspection related to electronics is very typical for us in this region.
Where they are manufactured?
Our SBE Shenzhen inspection team is in charge of all the inspections in the area, normally the trip to most of factories take between 40 minutes to 2 hours. This factory is located in Bao’an a district in Northern Shenzhen, although there are factories located in mostly all the districts around downtown and in closer cities like Donguan.
Normal Order Quantities
Quantities really variate from Customer to Customer, and Suppliers are normally eager to match all types of orders small and big, but normally if you want to have your own logo printed on the phones you will need to match an MOQ (Minimum Order Quantity) of at least 500 pcs and pay some extra fees for the printing films.
This time our customer has placed a small order of 3,000 smart phones. According to AQL (Average Quality Level, read more about it here), we had to sample 200 pieces of phones for workmanship (visual) inspection and 13 for testing.
Why to inspect?
Our main purpose for this inspection is to make sure the phones work correctly and are capable to function under specific country parameters such as APN, Frequencies, etc…Obviously, we also make sure that they are in good general conditions and requirements are met (packing, logos, labels, manuals, accessories, others…) and the quantities are correct according to PO requirements.
How to inspect a phone?
As every inspection we do in China, we use the state of the art technology from Tech4Trade application, this technology allows out inspectors to follow requirements and a QC plan directly in an Android phone and reporting results in REAL TIME… Funny thing that we are using an Android camera/phone to inspect another Android phone, but such are things in life!So, when all ready and the sampled phones are randomly taken from the warehouse, we separate the inspection process in three works stations:
- Workmanship Inspection. One of our inspectors is exclusively doing the workmanship inspection, checking for appearance defects and general functions of the device.
- Requirements Check. In a different work station we perform a general requirements check the size, operative system, CPU, language, memory or the battery among other things. We also check labels, packing and accessories. For this type of inspection the cooperation of the factory is very important. The sample is quite big, so the supplier helps us to have the phones ready to inspect to ease the process. Still, our inspectors are the ones who always choose which samples to check!
- Testing, Testing and Testing. For Android phones, the most important thing is to make sure the connection and network works according to the destination country frequencies and parameters. Because, who wants a phone that does not make calls or does not connect to the internet? For instance, we inspect phones that are for Mexico, so we have to use Mexican SIM cards to check that everything is working well and confirm frequencies according to what the local regulations are.Still, these are smartphones! We use them for more than just calling and texting our friends. Therefore, we also needed to check other functions like the camera, mp3 player, calendar and GPS. Finally, we checked the APN and the network connections.
Results for this time inspection…
- – The factory had finished all the products in time.
- – The product is the same as the required by the customer.
- – Labels, packaging and accessories were all correct.
- – All the tests went well.
- – However, there were too many issues regarding the workmanship. For this sample we can only accept 10 major issues and 14 minors; and for this case there were: 14 major issues! Most of them being either the phone having dust, air bubbles or being dirty.