Lead Time and China Production

Producing items overseas has its advantages, but also does require a bit of planning when it comes to lead time. Depending on your situation, typical turn time for printing projects in China is 6-8 weeks. Of course larger or more complex projects will require more time. In this post, we offer some information to help you better manage China production lead time.

Pre-production
Dummy (white sample) preparation time. While Express Courier each way is normally only 2-3 days, this method may add a week or so to preparation time. For special paper and cloth materials that require additional order times or complex products that demand engineering or several rounds of prototypes, it would be wise to plan 2-4 weeks for preparation.

Preflight and file ready time. For suppliers with professional preflight software, it takes as little as one hour to check hundreds of pages. Since the software is only capable of finding general problems such as low-dpi images, missing bleeds, or color space problems, a manual check is required as well to detect other inaccuracies such as incorrect spelling or missing page numbers.

Production
Production requires about the same amount of time in China as anywhere else. If the item requires a lot of manual labor, less time is generally needed due to the possibility of adding more laborers to the job. However it is wise to make sure that all requirements are clearly stated and all production conditions clearly understood before the job begins, as any confusion will cause unnecessary delay.

Shipping
While production time in China may be the same or less than that of your local printer, shipping time indeed makes the difference. The below chart provides some rules of thumb you can use to plan your shipping time.

In addition to the actual shipping time, you must take into account the time for customs clearance (usually 2-3 days), GST Settlement (Australia), and potential delays due to additional customs inspections, poor weather conditions or other unforeseeable events

Tips for reducing production time
• Communicate clearly what you want in writing, preferably with samples and/or photos, so that preproduction and production results will be more accurate.

• If the product is simple and you trust your supplier, forego some lesser sample stages and accept photos and reports instead.

• Partial air shipment is the fastest way to get the final samples on hand for urgent use, but it’s always very expensive to do so. Roughly, FedEx fees are around $20/kg to Australia, $28/kg to US/UK, and $45/kg to South America or South Africa.

• Look for ways to speed up shipping. For instance, sailing to the East Coast of the United States via the Panama Canal is cheaper, but takes longer. Full containers will clear customs faster. If using multiple containers, you should plan to ship them separately.