China Manufacturing Consultants

Chinese New Year (CNY), the most disruptive event in China, officially begins on February 5^th, 2019. The rush, and subsequent slowdown, often much sooner than that depending on the facility.

Most businesses come to a standstill for the holidays as a flood of workers return to their home villages to be with their families. The Telegraph reported in 2017 that the country's authorities expected the nation to make around 2.5 billion trips by land, 356 million by rail, 58 million by plane and 43 million by sea during Chunyun (春运) — the world's largest annual human travel season. 

And after the holidays, many workers stay home and don't return to their factories. General managers are left scrambling to find and train replacements. So even if the holiday itself is only 3 weeks long, companies can take nearly 2 whole months to return to pre-holiday production levels!

It doesn't have to be this way. If a factory plans its operations correctly and makes changes before and during CNY, it can quickly regain full production and be a stronger, leaner manufacturing machine.  

Anyone involved in trade and manufacturing knows that the trade row between the United States and China is not good for business. Rising tariffs on both sides create price increases that are felt in almost every industry.

The idea of factory process improvement is something a lot of factory owners and managers in China are resistant to, but the truth is that improvement can be effectively managed and scaled up by simply starting out small.

Using “mini-projects” instead of wholesale factory shake-up is a great way to bring the team around to the idea that change can be good.

In this article, we’ll discuss how one can get started on the road to factory process improvement and how to scale it up to larger improvements.