It's still plenty possible to avoid this situation...namely, establishing a total quality management program and acceptance sampling plans. Unless you're making something very critical, and very precise, you shouldn't be at 100% testing. Anyway, that's me being nit-picky, it's good that jobs are coming back from offshoring but I'm interested in how long-term these gains will be as automation continues to hold its own."We got to the point where everything we were bringing in had to be inspected," says Lonnie Kane, president of Los Angeles apparel maker Karen Kane, noting that his company used to check just 10% of goods from China.
Sampling works great with consistent manufacturing and you low failure rates. If you consistently fail your sampling plan but the product is long flow then you need to do 100% receiving inspection to segregate bad product from passable product. If you rejected everything that failed sampling you would have no product.
True, if those lots aren't high volume. If the quality of product/material that you're receiving is that poor though, I'd imagine you'd want to go pay your contract manufacturer a visit to figure out what's going on.