Factories: The Human Touch in Mass Manufacturing
Al Ullman – Account Manager at GPI
I recently traveled to China for the first time with GPI President Mike Fisher to meet the people at our factories who make everything we do possible. It was an eye-opening experience and the most important takeaway that I wish everyone in our industry could get is how integral the human touch is in the China manufacturing process.
When consumers think of China factory manufacturing, they don’t have a clear picture of what that really means. A lot of people think that factories are essentially just robots that churn out products. The reality is very different. Even the most automated factories rely on skilled workers to operate the automated machinery and handle Quality Control procedures. As an example, at one of our factory site visits, an automated arm pulls finished sprues from an injection molding machine, the pieces to be used are removed from the sprue, and the leftover material is dropped into a grinder to recycle the material for future use.
The automated machine can repeat this process ad nauseam, but when the color in use needs to be swapped out for a new color, this becomes the responsibility of the operator. He climbs the machine, operates a pneumatic (air pressure) blower to remove any remaining material in the original color, and hauls 25kg bags of raw material to make the color switch. Finally, the operator must use visual cues that he is trained to identify, to determine when all the material in the original color has passed through the machinery so new items can be made. Here is a short video of part of this process:
Things that seem so simple can be incredibly involved, and without the skilled and well-trained operators at our factories, many of the things we take for granted in our daily lives would not be possible. For small orders, many procedures are not done with automation and end up with many workers hand gluing, taping, painting, folding, cutting, operating simple machines, and assembling products entirely by hand. Others use their training to compare print samples to proofs to ensure they match precisely before going into full production, and when they find discrepancies, make tweak after tweak to get it just right.
And beyond the manufacturing processes, the people at factories are hard-working and constantly working to find ways to make the product you dream of for your company the way you want it. Here is a picture of some of our factory colleagues prototyping and iterating to assist one of our customers in getting the design of their game just right:
It is such a wonderful thing to be able to have such a great personal relationship with our factories. It allows us to spend this kind of time together working out solutions for cost optimization while maximizing component quality on behalf of you, our friends, and our customers. The combined decades of China manufacturing expertise for making games means that together we can quickly turn around solutions that our customers need.
When we talk about factory relationships, we really mean exactly that; it is a relationship between people, people that you rely on without ever knowing, people that work tirelessly to help you bring your products to market, and people that make sure your products are the best that they can be. So while we are in the midst of Chinese New Year celebrations, please join me in thanking the factory workers, machine operators, print specialists, 3D modelers, quality control specialists, prototypes, and everyone else who work tirelessly to bring your products to life. Kung Hei Fat Choi!