Have any of you had any experiencing outsourcing some of your manufacturing to another country? What has been your experience? Where did you outsource to? Would you do it again?

We had tried outsourcing some of our software development overseas and found it very difficult given the time and language barriers. I would suggest the most important thing you can do is pilot a program. Make sure that the pilot starts with a very simple task with little or no learned skill. First it will be less expensive and you will be able to easily see if the communication/time zone is going to be an issue.

The other thing to consider is the quality of the firm. It is worth spending sometime upfront finding a quality firm like anywhere there are wide variations of service and you should find a firm that has outsourced in the past and has good referrals.

We had a client use an firm in India for presentations. They would take a piece of paper and draw out their ideas and then scan the document and email it to the firm in India and the next morning they would wake up and the presentation would be waiting for them. It worked out great because it was fairly straight forward and it took advantage of the time difference.

We had a client that had some of their manufacturing outsourced to China. It worked out really well, I think one of the reasons was that they had a subsidiary in London and the had one employee based in Hong Kong who oversaw the development and quality. I have heard of other companies that have done everything remotely and have waited to the product to reach them in Canada before finding out a particular lot number was bad - wasted time and money.

We helped a client outsource their manufacturing of a toy to China. It was meant to look like an old toy and it was made out tin it had 7 different pieces that had to be put together. We saved about 60% of the actual production costs by sending it to China that was offset by about a 10% increase in communication and shipping cost. All in all it was a good venture for my client and they still are having it manufactured in China

I agree we have gone through so many vendors because of poor quality or responsiveness and taking a pilot approach is the way to go until you develop a level of comfort and trust

I also believe in finding a "local" (US) source who is either a broker or a contractor who has close ties with offshore facilities. Someone who spends time in both places.