Most of the factories I visited in China were upstairs. You take an elevator to the fifth floor, the doors open, and there’s a production line.
About a year ago, I spent 10 days in China. I flew into Guangzhou and took the high-speed rail to Shenzhen. I’m a manufacturing technology consultant in North America, so one of the goals of the trip was to see how manufacturing is done over there. I went in with a North American picture of what a factory looks like: a big single-floor warehouse on the edge of town, a parking lot, and a loading dock. What I saw was different enough that I’ve been meaning to write it down.
I’m not claiming any of this is how it’s done everywhere in China. This is just what I saw.
Factories Go Up
Most of the manufacturing companies I visited were in multi-story buildings. Not warehouses. Buildings that, from the street, looked like office towers. At one battery manufacturer, the bigger batteries were made on the main floor and the smaller ones on the floors above. Heavy stuff stays low, light stuff goes up.
In North America, when someone says “we’re setting up manufacturing”, the first thing they look for is a warehouse with a lot of floor space. Land is relatively cheap, so we build out instead of up. But a lot of manufacturing, especially electronics, garments, and other light goods, doesn’t need heavy machinery bolted to a concrete slab. It needs tables, people, power, and decent lighting. An office floor has all of that.
So to my North American friends: you can set up manufacturing in an office-tower-like building, and it works. It might even put you closer to your workers and your customers than an industrial park an hour out of town.
Finishing at the Counter
The second thing I noticed was in the markets, especially Huaqiangbei, Shenzhen’s huge electronics market. A lot of end-of-line manufacturing was happening right there in the stalls where the goods were sold. Sellers were putting the last pieces together, attaching straps and labels, even plugging in wires, and, almost always, doing the final packaging, all while waiting for customers. When a customer walked up, they put the work down and made the sale. When the customer left, they picked the work back up.
Compare that to a typical retail store in North America. Between customers, the store is staffed but quiet. That downtime is paid for, but nothing comes out of it.
If you’re a North American manufacturer with your own outlets, there’s a lesson here. Some of your final manufacturing steps could happen in the store. Customization, final assembly, engraving, gift wrapping, kitting, and packaging are all good candidates. You’d be using hours you’re already paying for, and customers might even enjoy watching their product get finished in front of them.
So
None of this is magic. It’s people treating space and time as things to be used fully. A floor of a building is space, so put a production line on it. Time between customers is time, so finish a product with it. North American manufacturers tend to separate things: factories here, stores there, offices somewhere else, and everyone waits for the truck. Sometimes that separation is necessary. Often it’s just habit.
Which step in your process sits where it is out of habit, not need?
Aside
On my flight home, after over an hour in the security line, the officer checking my passport told me to step aside. Then he just left me standing there while everyone behind me went through. Nobody explained anything. A few minutes later, a second officer showed up, scribbled a note on my boarding pass, and sent me back to the check-in desk for a “baggage check”.
At the desk, they pulled my checked bag and searched it in front of me. Out came a small microcontroller I had bought for a remote tank monitoring project. They looked at it for a few seconds, then handed it to me instead of putting it back in the bag.
Back at security, I did the math: another hour in line meant missing my flight. So I bravely walked into the no man’s land between the queues, waved my boarding pass and its note at an officer, and did my best to explain that I had already done this line once. He walked me over to a much shorter VIP line, and I made my flight on time.
Lesson learned: microcontrollers go in your carry-on. Unless you want to try the VIP line.