Supply Chain’s Secret Sauce: Relationships

As a global manufacturing company, spending time in each of Fictiv’s four global regions (China, India, Mexico, USA) is important to Nate, my Co-Founder, and I. It’s a great way to know our unique people, their expertise and capabilities, and to walk the factory floor. 

Last month, we headed to China for Lunar New Year and to meet with key partners, suppliers, and employees 

Celebrating Together 

This trip was particularly special because we had the privilege of welcoming in the Year of the Dragon with Fictiv employees and some of their families

Our Year of the Dragon celebration blended Chinese and Western traditions, and all of the families came. We always love meeting the partners, spouses, mothers, and kids of all of our Fictiv employees. The party kicked us off, but we also wanted to get out to our strategic manufacturing partners and see employees in action. It’s our belief that traveling to each of our key regions builds invaluable relationships and trust. This trip was no exception.

The Strengths of China’s Manufacturing Ecosystem

Like in India, Mexico, and the US, Fictiv has an Operations Hub in China, led by our General Manager Cameron Moore and staffed with Fictiv quality engineers, logistics managers, and manufacturing engineers—to ensure quality at the source. We also have strategic sourcing, program management, finance, HR, and leadership teams. While in China, we spent time with each group to gain a deeper understanding of our full range of functions. We also visited some of our strategic manufacturing partners, including tooling factories and a progressive die stamping facility, which was fascinating.

Seeing our Fictiv employees and manufacturing partners in action reinforced our belief that China still plays a critical role in a resilient, agile supply chain. Over the past 30-40 years, China has made significant investments in infrastructure and education and built an entire ecosystem around manufacturing. 

And even after three years of geopolitical instability and a pandemic, China is still one of the world’s largest manufacturing centers. Talking to factory owners, I saw firsthand how they’ve invested in automation and sophisticated tooling offered at competitive pricing as well as the talent and labor that makes everything possible.

My belief is that China will continue to be a key component of many, many supply chains, even as companies are looking to diversify to other regions. There’s also a lot of capacity available right now, so I think it's a great time to leverage China.

Retaining Top Talent

Like in the US, China factory owners shared the difficult challenge of retaining top talent. Our belief is that Fictiv addresses this challenge by diversifying project workstreams across numerous industries, standardizing workflows, and offering a technology platform to redeploy workers away from manual administrative tasks.

One metric we’re incredibly proud of is our retention in our China office. Our office is internally known as 飞缔 “Feidi” or Flying Innovation, we have over 95% retention and an average tenure of almost 5 years.

Without Fictiv, factory operations are often buried in administrative tasks like responding to emails, producing quotes, and generating DFM feedback. What we do is simplify their workflow so they can focus on what they're great at, which is manufacturing amazing parts, and not worrying about all the administrative overhead. We offer the same value to our end customers, mechanical engineers, and supply chain professionals as we offer our manufacturing partners time back through technology-enhanced workflows

Supply Chains Are Relationship Driven

Showing up, shaking hands, having tea, sitting down for dinner —building deep relationships with our manufacturing partners around the world is the strength of Fictiv as a global partner. We fly people all over the world, we have local teams and love the boots-on-the-ground aspect of what we do. It’s one of our key differentiators and reasons customers choose Fictiv as their supply chain partner to launch new products.

In the end, the journey through China was more than a business trip. It was truly a celebration of diversity, a recognition of the strength of strategic partnerships, and a testament to the importance of relationships in supply chains.

The above note is part of my newsletter, The Blueprint, where I talk about supply chains, technology, and mechanical BOMs.

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Learn more about Fictiv and how we help companies simplify sourcing for custom manufacturing at www.fictiv.com.