AMRM News
Manufacturing in China
The principals of Auscision recently visited their factories in China and published some interesting observations regarding the current ‘state of play’ affecting the Australian market. They noted that the factories were short of workers, down by about 20% compared with prior years, a factor in the recent production delays for many of their models. Another observation was that the factory managers had drawn their attention to the problems caused by the huge numbers of variations and colour schemes that Auscision demanded in their production runs and the problems that was causing due to the shortage of trained staff.
The factories would much prefer to produce a model with one or two body versions/colour schemes in quantities of 1000 models per version, but Auscision noted that reducing the variations and increasing the quantities per version would cause problems getting sufficient sales volume with our ‘fussy’ market. They noted that their 48/830 class project had 94 different body versions/colour schemes with an average quantity of 50 units per version/colour, which contributed substantially to the delays experienced with this project, so this may be the last time they will be able to provide a model release with that number of variations in body type and colour scheme in the initial release.
In future, Auscision expects that they will have to reduce the number of body versions/colour schemes during the first production run and look at making different versions over two/three production runs which will allow the initial release to be closer to the target date, but will take longer overall to deliver all the less popular variations.
They also noted that when they announce a delivery date, it is based on known information regarding factory delivery times, but that the final delivery date is still very much just a prediction at that point in time. This can get blown out by factory or technical delays that are out of their control. They have resolved that in future they will only post an official delivery date once a model is in production and the factory has set a firm delivery date.
They also mentioned, in response to uninformed whining about delivery dates ‘slipping’, that they don’t delay models deliberately, as this would not benefit them at all. Quite
