Originally Posted by
Brian Ratliff
Quality control is not the act of training the technicians to be good technicians. It is actively inspecting a certain subset of your product to ensure the tooling and builds are still within the specified tolerances. This takes time, it takes a different subset of technical skill, and it takes money. It is an active inspection and testing process, and with carbon layup, it is probably a destructive testing process. Good technicians are essential for a good product, but so is a careful monitoring of process drift. You can have extremely skilled technicians, popping product out on an extra shift for extra cash, that goes out the side door of the factory and is never properly accounted for or quality inspected. And, hey, maybe these frames are quality controlled, but for an internet company with hidden ownership and based in China where there are fewer actively enforced regulations than the US and a somewhat shady legal system, why would you? It's extra expense, lawsuits originating in the US don't touch you, and if something breaks, you save face by being overly generous with replacement product.
Quality control is so much more than you have suggested. Japan's rise to superiority in the auto industry wasn't based on after-production inspection (actually that is quality assurance, not quality control), it was based on in-production improvements and reduced post-production inspection. Only in the most backward examples of quality management are quality control (QC) and quality assurance (QA) mistakenly taken to be the same thing.
You are absolutely correct that control charting plays a huge part in effective quality control during production, but the manufacturers that have drunk the Kool Aid (a good thing) have learned that in-process quality control doesn't add cost, it produces savings. After-production quality assurance like the destructive testing you mentioned becomes less and less necessary as in-process quality control becomes more and more effective.
The net result is lower cost, not higher cost. The exception to this rule would be the case where every frame, no matter how badly made, would be allowed to be shipped under a "who cares" philosophy. In that case QC and QA would be an unnecessary expense. The positive reviews we see about the most popular of these off-brand brands strongly suggests that isn't the case. In short, customer satisfaction, which seems to be the norm in this area, doesn't happen by accident. Hence, it isn't realistic to suggest that QC and QA aren't an important part of the business model. I will admit that no one we have access to knows the answer for sure, but my money is on a reasonable and informed level of QC/QA in these off-brand bike factories.