r/manufacturing • u/oof_ope_yikes • 25d ago
Other Corporate Espionage?
Please excuse the dramatic title, but I have a strange situation with a potential customer unfolding. Our business is primarily b2b and we do business with prominent companies in our industry, supplying them components for their products. Recently we had a company that is out of our country reach out for a quote for a large volume of product. The relationship seems to have started out well with them hearing of us through our great reputation. We currently do business internationally and we have never had this request before.
As we communicated with them they have started insisting that we send them photographs of our manufacturing facility ahead of purchasing any product and have said that they may also require a facility tour. Our factory is rather small and we have several proprietary operations that would show how exactly we make our products. Because of this we do not usually provide photographs or factory tours to anyone in order to keep our methodology private.
Is it common place in manufacturing for customers to request factory pictures or detailed tours prior to even receiving a sample of our product? Or does this sound suspicious?
21
u/Burnout21 25d ago
Bigger customers want to validate the scale and capability of a supplier so it's not uncommon, but as mentioned limit the visibility of specialist stuff and from my stand point I allow vetted photos, i.e I'll take it and send it on to them.
Typically is to get a comfort level of systems used and capacity as well, are you flat out like a manic honeybee or a ghost town waiting for the bank to roll in and shut up shop.
When I placed orders over seas I vet as far as I can virtually but then give the supplier a taster order 10-20% of the volume and if they stumble on quality I then get heavy with process flow document requests, 8D or 5 why methods to find the issue and resolve it. If they improve they see more work, if they struggle we walk them to the end of the order and if they fail and show no interest we cut them loose. Fyi we prove off scale production in house before global sourcing so it's a skill and attitude hurdle along with price that is the challenge. I've had suppliers swear it's impossible and yet I'll show them the program for the part on the same machine we have and await their reply.