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Where EAST meets the Northwest
QUALITY CONTROL. Sally Shang, product support engineer for Lamb Industries Inc., poses for a photo in Portland, Ore. Shang had never been in the United States until a recent business trip that included Portland. (AP Photo/The Oregonian, Motoya Nakamura)
From The Asian Reporter, V18, #1 (January 1, 2008), page 8.
Oregon company employs Chinese engineer to inspect products
By Richard Read
The Oregonian
SHENZHEN, China (AP) — Sally Shang had never been in the United States until a business trip last month that included Portland. But figuratively, she has stood at the ends of millions of American driveways, preventing children in miniature cars from speeding into traffic.
Shang, a slim 30-year-old product-support engineer with flowing black hair, works in China for Lamb Industries Inc. The Portland company invents and sells electronic switches, including ones that prevent foot pedals on kids’ cars from failing in the "on" position. The sharp-eyed factory inspector is one big reason that, according to Lamb, switches don’t jam open on toy vehicles ranging from Mattel Inc. Escalades to Peg Perego Gators.
Shang is one of an invisible cadre of inspectors that’s growing while Chinese manufacturers, and the Western companies hiring them, strive to put the Year of the Recall behind them. Her role illuminates how far firms must go to ensure quality in China, the manufacturing giant blamed for many recalls.
"We have to stay very close to production," Shang says. "In China, we say, ‘Only trust what you see.’"
Shang, a bright, ambitious badminton player, personifies China’s gains from U.S. trade. While Americans rake in inexpensive goods and profits, Chinese manufacturing managers enter an expanding cosmopolitan middle class.
Shang has bought an apartment for her parents in their Hubei-province hometown. She has vacationed in Thailand. She would buy a car if Shenzhen, a boomtown next to Hong Kong, didn’t have so much traffic.
"Our living standard is different than America or Europe," Shang says. "But we can say we are luckier than many people in the world."
Lamb Industries, which hired Shang last May, is one of millions of invisible actors on the global manufacturing stage that produce obscure but critical products. The privately held company with undisclosed sales operates from an unobtrusive brick office building behind Scholl’s Plaza shopping center in Raleigh Hills.
Chief Executive Larry Lamb, a career international banker with a degree from Arizona’s Thunderbird School of Global Management, began the venture in 1979 after a client asked if he’d join him in the switch industry. Lamb and his wife, Deborah, put a Telex machine and an IBM typewriter in their Portland back bedroom to communicate with a Japanese supplier. Within six months, his moonlighting income far surpassed his salary as head of Oregon Bank’s international department.
Lamb quit the bank to go full time. He built a thriving company with a dozen employees that his son, Justin, helps run.
Now 69, Lamb has watched the world turn flat, as author Thomas L. Friedman says, linking workers, companies, and customers across the globe.
"It is flat," Lamb says. "But you’ve still got to know who’s on the other end."
For Lamb, that’s Shang, a night owl who works from her apartment when she’s not peering over factory inspectors’ shoulders. He hired Shang after seeing her work as head production-line engineer at a Signal Lux Italy factory in China.
"I was impressed with her English," Lamb says. "She had tooling, production-line, and quality-engineer experience."
Shang had majored in mechanical and electrical engineering in college. She worked for a Taiwanese firm in a gritty factory town, drawing tooling diagrams for cell-phone keypads. Later, she moved to Shenzhen, working for a U.S. company making bathroom scales.
As a full-time Lamb employee, Shang frequently visits Lamb’s independent contract factories in seven Chinese cities. She travels by plane and bus, checking on products made for the Portland firm.
"The most important thing is communicating with the customers," says Shang, referring to Mattel and other brand-name companies. "Sometimes, customers only give us a concept, then we design the product and give it back to them for confirmation."
Shang believes that recalls often result from contract factories that promise more than they can deliver. Others merely follow orders, she says, meeting specifications without checking products. Communications also break down between Western companies and Chinese factories.
Soon after beginning her current job, Shang puzzled over a batch of more than 600,000 switches that Lamb had sold to a California company for use in refrigerator icemakers. Each time an assembly worker at the U.S. company’s contract factory in China tried to solder a switch, it blistered, making it unusable.
Shang and her colleagues solved the puzzle, determining that a fridge-factory worker had opened plastic bags containing the switches, unintentionally exposing them to moisture. Lamb took back the switches and lightly baked them until they were as good as new. When the problem recurred, Lamb left the baking to the fridge factory.
Lamb’s signature product is the switch made for the accelerators of children’s battery-powered ride-in cars. A Lamb engineer noticed during the 1990s that when such switches wore out, they could stick in the "on" position, potentially rocketing kids out of driveways and into traffic. The problem tended to surface when overeager fathers souped up the cars with more powerful batteries.
The engineer invented a switch designed so that it could not fail in the "on" position. Each year, Lamb sells two million of the patented switches to Mattel, Peg Perego, and other makers of miniature vehicles.
During the first two years, Lamb says, just four of the switches failed as initially designed. As far as he knows, none of the next generation of improved switches has failed. Now, Shang is supporting Chinese factories as they meet new requirements by substituting silicon for toxic rubber-softening chemicals.
Lamb used to visit the Chinese factories five or six times a year, developing long-standing personal relationships. With Shang as support engineer, he can make fewer trips.
Recently, Shang fulfilled a long-held dream of visiting the United States. She landed in Portland and travelled on business with Lamb to Buffalo, N.Y.
Together they went to Monterrey, Mexico, where Mattel assembles the toy cars in a plant the size of 17 football fields.
Shang is proud of her accomplishments and proud of China’s progress.
"Yeah," she says, "but ‘Made in China’ is not enough.
"We should have our own patents. We should have some international brands. It’s not enough just to do the manufacturing."