 Welcome to Engineering for Change, or E4C for Short. Today, we're very pleased to bring you the latest E4C 2015 webinar series. Our webinar today will focus on how to manage global supply chains to developing countries and what's developed in collaboration with Trig Without Borders and Villa Jail. My name is Yana Aranda, and I'll be one of the moderators for today's webinar. When I'm not moderating webinars, I work with the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and Engineering for Change, where I am the Senior Program Manager. I'd like to take a moment now to tell you a bit about today's webinar, how to manage global supply chains to developing countries. Many of E4C's members reach out to us with poverty alleviating product ideas and questions about taking those products from concepts to launch, scaling up manufacturing and procuring goods from global suppliers. They are recognized challenges associated with global logistics management and emerging markets where we work in Asia, Africa or Latin America. Today, we've invited the founder of Trig Without Borders, or TWB, Joseph Fernandez, to shed some light on getting solutions to the last mile. TWB specializes in training services for global suppliers and local organizations within an underserved community and has developed a solo jail platform to expand clean energy access. Joe, we thank you for joining us today. Before we get rolling, I'd also like to take a moment to recognize the coordinators of the E4C webinar series. Along with myself, we have Collie Schneider-Brown, Michael Mater, Jackie Holliday and Steve Welch of IEEE, who work on developing and delivering the webinar series. Thank you, team. If anybody out there has questions about the series, or would like to make a recommendation for future topics and speakers, we invite you to contact us via the email address visible on the side. We have webinars at engineeringforchange.org. Before we move on to our presenter, we thought it would be great to remind you about E4C or Engineering for Change and who we are. E4C is a global community of now over 800,000 people, such as engineers, technologists, representatives from NGOs and social scientists who work together to solve humanitarian challenges based by underserved communities around the world, such as access to pot of the water, off-grid energy, effective healthcare, agriculture and sanitation, amongst others. We invite you to join E4C by becoming a member. Membership provides cost-free access to a growing inventory of field-tested solutions and related information from all the members of our coalition, as well as access to a passionate and engaged community working to make people's lives better all over the world. Registration is easy and it's free. Visit our website, engineeringforchange.org to learn more and sign up. The webinar you're participating in today is an installment of our webinar series. It's a free publicly available series of online seminars showcasing the best practices and thinking of leaders in the field. Information on upcoming installments in this series, as well as archive videos of past presentations, can be found on the E4C webinars webpage. You see the URL listed right there, along with our YouTube channel, though your URL is also listed. If you're following us on Twitter today, I'd also like to take a moment to invite you to join the conversation with our dedicated hashtag, hashtag E4C webinars. E4C's next webinar will be on April 29th at 11 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, and our topic will be Engineering for Global Development, Reflections on Affreshing. This webinar is part of a series exploring careers at the intersection of technology and global development. Stay tuned to the E4C webinars page for registration details. If you're already an E4C member, we'll be sending you a invitation to the webinar directly. So we have quite a few folks attending this webinar, so let's see where everyone is from today. Using the group chat, please type in your location now, and I already see that we have folks who have indicated that they're joining us from Afghanistan. I know we have folks from the United States, out of New Jersey, Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Perfect. Let us know where you're coming from. Connecticut. A few folks from Wisconsin. Perth, Australia. We have Tulsa and Toronto, Canada. Very cool. London, UK. We're so thrilled that all of you could join us today. It's fantastic to see folks from all over the world. Following the webinar, to request a certificate of completion of a professional development hour, or PDH, please follow the instructions at the top of our webpage, and you see the URL listed. Also, please make sure you take a moment to fill out our short survey. Your opinions are invaluable to the webinar series, and without your comments and suggestions, we wouldn't be where we are today. I see more folks, Atlanta, Saudi Arabia, Linwood, Washington. There you go. Thank you all. All right, so with that, I would like to take a moment to introduce today's presenter. Joe Fernandez is the founder and executive director of Trade With Up Order and Solar Jail. Joe has served as an advisor to graduate students, to graduate student energy and the environmental workshop at the Columbia University, and also served as an expert advisor to the Common Pitch 2011 Winner Bright Products and Venture of the Bell Solar Lab. Joseph is a member of several working groups of the UN Foundation's Energy Access Practitioners Network, including supply chain, and has served as a guest lecturer on social enterprise at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. We're thrilled to have Joe with us today, and I'm going to turn it over to him to take us to the rest of the webinar. Okay, thank you very much, Yana, for that nice introduction. Again, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, whichever part of the world you are. I myself am based in Hong Kong, so it's about a little after 10 p.m. over here, and I'm grateful, actually, to Engineering for Change for agreeing to my request to move the webinar one hour earlier, otherwise it would have been about 11 p.m. that we would be getting started, and I guess my concern was I may have do it myself during the course of the presentation, so this is definitely a little better for me. So let's get started here. So I just want to explain to you, I guess, a little bit more about trade with a boarder and Solar Jail, those are the two logos that you see on there. So trade with a boarder is I founded about eight years ago initially as a nonprofit entity in the U.S., and about five years ago we established a for-profit entity here in Hong Kong, and so in tandem I guess you could say it's a hybrid social enterprise by definition. And the Solar Jail platform, as Yana mentioned, is an online platform for clean energy products which we launched just last year and in the process of further developing and scaling up. And basically with what I will be presenting or sharing with you today is the experience that I guess we've gained in the work with trade with a boarder and the Solar Jail platform, and in particular the focus has been on extending the support services, if you will, trading services to both global suppliers, in the case of the Solar Jail platform, a clean energy product, as well as then local buyers. So we find there are a lot of product suppliers out there, there's a lot of organizations working on the ground that no one had been sort of addressing the challenges and facilitating the flow of the product and from the global suppliers to the local buyers. So that's really a major area of our focus. So on the part of our, our high vision, if you will, what we hope to do in the world like we live in is to contribute to sustainable development through responsible and inclusive trade of impact products. So that's the high level vision and then bringing that down to our mission which is to create this social, economic and environmental impact within underserved communities by expanding access to impactful products and again with clean energy being the focus of Solar Jail. But certainly with trade with our borders, we would hope to be able to do the same thing then with other categories of product and expanding the flow of healthcare supplies and so forth. So Jan has done a very good job already of presenting myself here so I won't talk more about myself but get right onto the topic here about some of the challenges then that we confront in actually facilitating this huge gap that exists between global suppliers and local buyers. So while there certainly is a big gap, you could say, in the availability of appropriate, affordable and good quality products specifically for developing regions of the world, on the other hand you do have, in the case of let's say solar line terms, you do have a number of solutions that exist already and there are many university departments, for example engineering departments where students or professors are working on the next great thing, the next great impact product and I have over the years have had lots of conversations with the professors or students about their products and discussing with them how to scale up production or things for them to think about in getting their products to people who can benefit from them. But the bigger challenge, like I said, is probably beyond the products inside you then cost effectively scale up production of those products while doing the cost effectively but still ensuring the good quality of those products and how do you efficiently deliver them those products to the local communities and how do you do it all in a financially viable and sustainable manner. So that's sort of the high level challenge and then breaking down those challenges if you will and looking specifically at product suppliers. So with suppliers they're primarily looking at getting their products manufactured in low cost markets in order to ensure the affordability of the products and you have the little icon for China there and of course I'm based in Hong Kong so a lot of what I will talk about as far as product sourcing or manufacturing will have a China lens to it but hopefully what I have to share with you will apply irrespective of the low cost market that you choose to manufacture your product and the other challenge so with the supplier it may be getting that production scaled up in that low cost market and then of course if you've got that sorted out then it's getting the distribution sorted out for your product from those suppliers to the local buyers and then if you're a buyer and particularly since the focus is on developing regions of the world what we find really is that certainly there are a number of NGOs and various local enterprises but a general characteristic if you're talking about actually what the buyers are serving those local communities there are a lot of small and medium organizations and by nature the small and medium organizations they do not have the resources of let's say a major big box retailer or a major importer in a developed market so for them to go about accepting those quality products that are being needed in their communities is a huge challenge if they have identified this product managing the supply chain to get those products to their local communities is a significant challenge as well so just to summarize at a high level the challenges we don't have a single path between those local suppliers and these local buyers and particularly to talk to developing countries that pathway if you will between supplier and buyer is even more and even more winding even more steep path and definitely not as streamlined as supply chains maybe to develop markets so what I'd like to move on to now so from that high level view if you will of the challenge is this given to some specifics and of product procurement, product development and global supply chain management so the good news is the Jack and Belinda Gates Foundation is hiring a procurement manager so if you are the lucky person who is selected as a procurement manager then the questions for you would be where to begin going about procuring the supplies that you need to and in this case, just in this example we'll use school supplies as the example of the products you're looking to procure so where to begin and what are the steps you're going to go through then to qualify the products and the suppliers and what are the challenges and how are you going to overcome those challenges in making it all work so first of all, you may if you're looking to procure you may go online and you may many people are familiar with Alibaba.com and there are many other online sites like GlobalSources.com and you may find in fact a display of a number of different school supplies I'd say but the thing to I guess be aware of is when you get down to those online sites and you may access then the website of the manufacturer I guess the thing to keep in mind is that literally anyone can create a beautiful website so you really don't know who is behind the products that are featured on that online platform and you may not even know if you're actually dealing with a factory or it might be a trading company or some other kind of entity and it may not be a bad thing to work with the trading company rather than directly with the manufacturer if you're looking to procure products and certainly something like school supplies where you're talking about lots of little stuff and many different kinds of little stuff that may be more practical to work with the trading company but then the work I have at the top of the slide Kaviat and Tor which is a Latin for buyer beware you still need to be aware of the entity that you might be dealing with and I just give you a couple of examples so one customer that we're working with right now this is something that happened fairly recently with them so there's a supplier that they've been working with for at least one year or so longer and the last order that they confirmed with the supplier they received the pro forma invoice from the supplier with all the product details and their updated banking information and they went back confirming the order and taking care of the wire transfer for the deposit to the manufacturer and lo and behold they learned later in the follow up communications with the manufacturer that they had never received the deposit and moreover the manufacturer never sent the pro forma invoice to them so it was actually somebody else who was posing as the factory and provided their own bank found details and so the money basically went to the long account in this case there are also situations where you have a marketing representative that's a factory who works for a factory and promoting the factory's products but maybe his good friend works for another factory and he will advise his buyer to have a great new product to introduce to you which he will promote he or she will promote as his own factory's product while in fact it's coming from somewhere else and like I said it could be another trading company that's just handling this product and an actual situation that we've confronted with that and then the owner of the factory came to us and said do you know of the situation and we had to provide lots of supporting e-mails with this person and things like that because they filed a court case against the employer filed a court case against the employee and unfortunately we were involved in having to provide a lot of the supporting e-mails and things like that so again the main point here is buyer beware in terms of early knowing and understanding who you're actually dealing with so let's say you do have the factory sorted out for your products so how do you go about ensuring the quality of that factory or the products that you're working with so there are a few different things to keep in mind and it'd be kind of difficult it probably would be a webinar topic on to itself in terms of how you go about qualifying the factories but I'll just touch on a few quick points here first of all the extent of the experience that the factory has with that particular category of products that you are looking to procure so for example a factory may feature a new solar lantern that they are introducing to buyers and you may like the product it looks good and everything like that but if you dig deeper what you may find is that the factories main product line is actually candles for example or something completely not related to solar lanterns and maybe somebody came to them and said hey you deal with lighting products or how about making a solar lantern for us and they went about sourcing the materials for a solar lantern and assembling the lanterns but not having any of the testing equipment in place so having that product specific experience can certainly be helpful when you're looking at qualifying the factory but there are a number of other things the basics are do they have proper income and quality control for the components coming in do they have quality systems on the production line do they have systems in place to inspect the goods the finished goods and depending on the type of product that you are working with are they undertaking reliability testing and then asking lots of questions about what kinds of reliability testing they do and for how long and so forth there and of course besides quality then the social responsibility access can be important so if you're preparing for UNICEF then ensuring there's no child labor for example would of course be very important and then their environmental considerations and then there's a lot of issues then you can get into when you're looking at social and environmental issues and again that probably could be again a webinar topic unto itself but getting now more into then looking at then how do you go about qualifying the products themselves but one thing that you might look at is to what extent is the manufacturer vertically integrated with the manufacturing so it will be very common that the factory will outsource various processes procure components from different vendors and so forth but the vertical integration can be helpful in certain categories a product for example if you take a product like a mobile phone charger device and the mobile phone connectors that would then connect to an iPhone or Samsung phone or Nokia phone for example so there are a lot of in China public tools for example and the problem with the public tools is you don't have any proper control in terms of how that tool is made and the plastic parts that are produced using that public tool while if a factory has a tooling capability in-house for those connectors and they're doing their own plastic injection chances are the quality of those connectors are going to be much much much better and then what kind of testing is done for the products and particularly when you approach factories who may for example have experience applying to the European market and they're familiar with all of the European certifications, CE and so forth there but if you approach the factory and this is happening many many many times in the case of TWD where we communicate to the factory okay the market for this product or the target market is in Africa and what you will get then is the quotation for the product with absolutely no testing included in the price that's quoted because the factory is assuming that you do not need any testing whatsoever for your product because it's going to do to Africa so that's their presumption, incorrect presumption or they may have that experience unfortunately with perhaps traders from certain markets who don't care about their quality they're just looking at the lowest price and so they're just getting the lowest quality product at the lowest price adding up their margin and once they've been able to successfully sell the product they of course do not care about anything after sale service or anything else about this product and certainly those who have spent time in many of these markets know that many of them are flooded with lots of low quality products from China in that sense unfortunate situations that you will have even good quality factories that know about testing that have testing processes in place but they just are assuming that your requirements are going to be different if you're going to be supplying products for a developing region so that testing is something you definitely have to verify and confirm and reconfirm and double check the other thing then is just the fundamental technical competencies of the factories and typically in the particular product that you're dealing with so on the part of trade with our borders we have well-established processes in place and what you see here is just sort of a very high level flow chart that outlines at a very high level kind of what we might go through when we're looking at procuring products so every product that's on the slide platform that's been procured or products that we have helped develop ourselves are fully vetted products and the factory will have been checked the product will have been fully vetted and the factory will have been audited before we're including products on the site so this is just for your reference again a very high level view of our product procurement process but of course there are a lot more detail involved in the process as well so moving from now product procurement then and looking at new product development so one thing there's the 80-20 rule in a lot of different environments and that's when you're looking at new product development in China and the way the 80-20 rule would apply then in China when you're looking at product development is you'll find that most of the products that get designed and developed and therefore the experience of the factories is on product design and development for the developed markets and it's the simple reason is that those who invest in product design and development tend to be buyers or companies from developed markets so there are very few from Sub-Saharan Africa who are bringing designs to manufacturers over here so one product that we ourselves have to develop and bring to the market is a DC LED TV and we've introduced product to the market in in 2013 and last year there was a final for the Global Leap Award and so forth and one challenge that you find with the TV category is that almost the vast majority of the TVs most TVs are manufactured in China but the vast majority of them are large screen TVs that consume a lot of power and so virtually very very few TVs of a smaller size more energy efficient and so forth that would be more appropriate for off-grid communities in developing regions very few of those are actually available so we when we went about looking for to develop the TV this is what we found and so we actually had to do a lot of work on ourselves in terms of educating the factory that we we ended up working with to develop the TV to help them understand what the market potential might be that you have this huge underserved market that has a demand for such a product for a small screen of highly energy efficient TV so that's what we're one of the fundamental challenges that you might encounter in just getting started with your product development project now the focus here is not on necessarily product design but let's say you've got your design sorted out and you're ready to scale up the manufacture of that particular product that you've established the design for so the first thing here is when you look at factory or factory selection and it's the product development project as opposed to a product procurement project so something where you're procuring off the shelf an existing product the factory manufacturers are supposed to taking a new product idea to a factory the factory selection process is actually different because you want a different type of factory to work on a proprietary product that you are looking to develop with your ideas and so forth so there is a difference in the factory selection process and then there are a few other things that go into the factory selection process and this is looking at the longer term supply chain issues in getting a product manufactured and delivered to your target market so the location of the factory is the most manufacturing in China for example on the coastal areas not surprisingly with the access to the port facilities but you also may the location is also important and when you're looking at what are the supporting supplier based if you will that may be required for the particular product that you are looking to develop so they are for example if you're looking at vacuum cleaners there are certain areas in China that are very strong in vacuum cleaners and there is a lot of surrounding supplier base of motors that are suitable for vacuum cleaners for example so having an understanding of the surrounding supplier base if you will for the components that are going to be necessary would be something important to consider as well and generally speaking that is a huge advantage that China in general has so even if you're looking to set up manufacturing let's say in West Africa for example so you may be able to get the factory set up, get the equipment there and everything like that but a big challenge is probably going to be getting the material that you need then to actually manufacture the product in that particular location and you may in fact have to resort to bringing components and so forth from China or Germany or or elsewhere so that fundamentally is a major advantage in general when we talk about manufacturing in China intellectual property again that also could be a webinar topic until itself but generally what I would say is that you kind of have to strike a balance in terms of you need to undertake all the due diligence that you would expect to undertake in protecting your intellectual property but there's a statistic I came across where by something like 97% of money that is spent on product patents the return on that investment if you will on that patent is never it's never realized because for various reasons it turns out you pay the lawyer, you do the patent filing you find that there's something already in existence that's very similar to what you had in mind or for whatever reason you thought it would never get to market or by the time it gets to market something else that's even better and cheaper than what you had in mind so there are strategies for intellectual property but again that could probably be a separate topic into itself but one thing when you're looking at setting up manufacturing and scaling up the production of your proprietary product you do have to consider how much you want to control and how much you're going to open up to the factory and let the factory undertake and take on so one thing you don't want to do is reinvent the wheel so to speak but there are issues like who will pay for the tooling so if you can convince the factory the potential of your products is a tooling and that may be fine it's the plastic housing for your product is less of an issue if it's like certain key components that are inside the product then you control that and maybe you get that even manufactured at a completely separate facility there so if you take for example a Phillips light bulb how much of that light bulb is actually owned if you will by Phillips and how much actually is just you know things that they push onto the factory whether it's gives the factory the specifications of the driver but it might be the factory that manufactures the driver for example and maybe the PCB is done by Phillips so there are different ways in terms of going about setting up your product development project simply to save costs and to scale up the manufacturing that much faster it's better to really push as much as makes sense to the factory itself and just try to control certain key things about your product so besides procurement and then product development then just getting into other issues to keep in mind if you've sorted out your factory you've got the manufacturing scaled up, you're ready to go the market quality management then becomes an issue and quality management when you're talking about China is basically perpetual nonstop ongoing you always have to stay on top of it and just a couple of reasons why for example you may have changes in the marketplace for certain key components for your product and we've had that situation for example with our LED TV just the nature of the supply for LCD panels change for the small panels and so there was that change fortunately with the factory we worked with they explained what the dynamics were in the marketplace for LCD panels and we worked with them to ensure that the new type of panel was still going to meet our requirements and so forth but you can have dynamics where components or the market for components changes and if you're not careful and the factory sort of undertakes those changes without you really being on top of it then the quality of your product can suffer or another thing could be that the factory has confirmed a price to you and they have very thin margins let's say but for a number of reasons the price of a particular critical component has gone up it could be seasonal issues and many other issues the raw material prices have gone up and things like that there and so the factory will unilaterally then procure that component from a lower cost supplier without informing you and that component is listed as a critical component in your test report and things like that and if you're not careful it can impact the quality of your product so that quality management is an ongoing issue that you have to keep in mind. The other thing then is after sale service so what kind of warranty are you providing on the product and what kind of service are you you may even be legally required to provide for your product in some Middle East countries for example you have to provide five years warranty for your product which is really highly impractical and what you'll find is of course with technology products you have rapid changes. I talked about the L2 panel for the TD but even if you're talking about a more basic panel basically sorry a more basic product the life cycle of that product even at the factory level maybe let's say a couple of years so if the factory has a rechargeable radio that they've introduced a couple of years later they've got new radios that they're introducing and that two-year-old radio the spare parts are no longer available and so on and so forth so it's something to keep in mind and think about what is the situation going to be for spare parts and depending on the kind of warranty and after sale service that you're going to be offering your product. The other things then are quickly to keep in mind China export considerations, local import considerations and then strategic management of your operations with China export considerations the key things there are with factories in China they have, well first of all what you need to know is do they have a license to export the particular product that you are manufacturing there so they may for example deal with the factories that they may not necessarily and they may have a license to export but it may not be for the particular product that you are sourcing from the factory that you choose to develop from the factory so that particular product may need to be registered with the proper authority in order to be exported from China. The other place where you might run into export issues is if you're buying small quantity product and then you're looking to consolidate those products well a factory may get for example a tax rebate for the product that they are exporting. If they sell in the domestic market they could put a 17% VAT so for the factories it's very important to get the proper documentation back showing that they exported their product and if you're consolidating product then there's a lot more paperwork and things like that that you have to take care of so those are some of the export considerations and then on the import side is of course then you may have issues where you have to have the product registered or the proper certificate of conformity for example in many East African markets for example for many many many categories of product and so we just need to be aware of what those requirements are to obtain that certificate of conformity and make sure that the factory or the product that you're comparing from the factory are going to meet all of those requirements and then getting into then you know so if you are going to scale up your manufacturing and you got something that's really good then you need to think through in terms of what's your operations, how are you going to manage your operations are you going to be able to manage it remotely from your office in Nairobi or do you need to engage an agent who's not on the payroll but that you're paying a commission to or do you need to hire China staff and one thing to keep in mind there is that so at the factory level there's wages paid to factory workers but if you're talking about someone based in Shenzhen, China for example who's you know with the university degree, maybe an engineering degree who speaks English or Spanish or whatever your requirements could be it may cost you a bit more to hire that person than you may expect and then of course you may choose to set up your China office and then deal with all of the administrative overheads there so moving just quickly then beyond the product and let's say the manufacturing side of things as I'm looking then at then actually getting your product to a different developing region so you know and typically the shop owner in Uganda or that women's cooperative in India for example and one of the things I guess that we have seen is going back to what I said previously about there being a lot of small and medium enterprises, a lot of smaller scale buyers that you might be looking at and a fundamental thing I guess I would say is that if you're going to be able to so I cannot comment about distribution in each individual country but I'm just talking about things more on a global level and something that would seem to be consistent regardless of the individual market is at the local level do you have the capability in order to be able to aggregate product requests because there will be a lot more smaller product requests from individual buyers in developing regions and do you have the system to place whatever that physical model may be in order to be able to aggregate product requests and then the other thing is then do you have a supply chain management system at the local level and that can extend globally and so when you talk about developed countries for the most part there are a lot of very efficient supply management systems but again those just like when I was talking about products being designed in the public markets with supply chain management resources so if you talk about information communication technologies to help you manage your supply chain operation so if I go to a software vendor in Hong Kong for example and to inquire about their supply chain management solution inevitably their solution will have been designed to cater to for example a big box retailer in North America or Europe so you don't have a lot of effective supply chain management tools if you will to serve the distribution situation in developing regions and so there are of course a number of organizations social enterprises and so forth that are actively working on bringing more and better solutions to addresses but fundamentally those are two things are you able to aggregate and are you able then to tap into some kind of a supply chain management system in order to create make things as efficient as possible in managing those supply chains so just to sort of move towards closing here and bring it back to the slides your platform so basically what we are really working hard at taking all of these issues that I've mentioned in procuring and developing product but again it's beyond product it's looking at the supply chain processes and what I hope is to be able to collaborate with and leverage a lot of existing solutions that are out there but to just like we might with products in making sure they are appropriate for developing regions to develop more of the supply chain resources and bring these into the larger platforms so that we can better serve under-served markets in developing regions so I'll skip over these state studies because it's getting a bit late here and I guess we can open up to questions. Thank you so much Joe you caught me a little bit off guard there I wasn't ready quite many times but I do appreciate it this has been incredibly insightful as you said a number of times there's topics that you covered very quickly or lately that are other webinars onto themselves and in fact if anybody in the listening audience is interested in exploring some of these topics deeply or deeper please feel free to let us know and we will maybe work with Joe again to develop that kind of offering. So with this in mind I would like to open it up to questions from our attendees regarding product development and procurement and we have some coming in already so I'll tackle the first one here Joe how often do you audit after the initial audit and what metrics do you use to know when to audit suppliers? So definitely when we first make contact with the factory before that process we will have a checklist with the factory if they don't meet all our requirements on that checklist then we're not taking things further so if we qualify the product and the factory at that first level then we do the more detailed audit so we will have the personal visit to the factory we've basically developed our own in-house quality system audit and this is based on the almost 20 years of experience that I've had working with manufacturers in China and looking at the audit systems of companies like Tesco in the UK and the Walmart of the world and major importers around the world a large company so I've interacted with the likes of GE on one client was working on a proprietary product that obtained a license from GE for the product for so we were dealing with GE and their quality systems and so forth so we basically took the best examples out there and tried to bring that in-house to establish our own quality systems process for the factory and then beyond that on the social front then we have a checklist of about 10 key items for the most part that we look at and a lot of these things are fairly standard and a lot of the entities like SGS and others that can conduct these social audits these are fairly standard things that they look at the dormitory facilities they're separate from the manufacturers they're proper fire escapes and a number of other things and then environmental audits are completely separate and for us I would say the auditing I mean in principle I think many companies will require an annual audit that the factory must require in our case we're sort of there at the factory regularly and so in a way ensuring the ongoing systems at the factory is almost like not quite as intense as the ongoing quality assurance for products but the awareness if you will is always there so it's also ongoing on stuff so it's difficult to talk about specific metrics here there are a lot of existing metrics that we ourselves have adopted or incorporated so I hope that addresses the question to some level cool we have a number of questions that have come in specifically driving at the practicalities or the issues associated with interacting with factories one question here is how do you go about getting the factory to finalize the design and manufacturing process of a patented product idea without having to use money at a market is that possible well I mean like they said I guess everything is possible and so the thing is I had a friend who worked for Mercedes Benz in Beijing and experienced that so they had that because required for Mercedes Benz to have a joint venture partner to manufacture their automobiles in China and lo and behold they found their JD partner this is a joint venture partner adopted their door design into the car doors that were being manufactured by that company for their own cars the domestic market so yes you can go through all the due diligence process you can sign your non-compete non-disclosure agreement and whatever agreement you are going to sign make sure that you do have a Chinese version whatever your native language is English you may be comfortable having something in English but make sure you have a Chinese version and there are if you have a good lawyer the right lawyer including one who can write things appropriately in the Chinese language then there are certain wording that you can incorporate to try to make it as broad in general as possible to protect yourself as much as possible because it's very easy to get around so just someone make a slight adjustment to what is your patented technology and in China it's not going to be protected so just how you work things and everything so the short answer is yes it is possible but as with many other things there are a lot of things that you need to be aware of if you are going to put those agreements in place that's great advice another question related to engaging with these kinds of factories is how can you push a factory to break down of parts or supplier costs for all of the components is this something that is usually given to the buyer of the product yes we're talking about a product development situation in that case yes and particularly if you are investing a significant portion of the money to get the product developed but even if you're not perfectly reasonable to request information on the component suppliers and the costs that are going to be involved there so it would be perfectly acceptable in order to do that and to make a request fantastic we're going to get to a little bit more of a philosophical question here which is with the it's almost 11 PM it's almost 11 PM it's all philosophical okay the questions get asked I have a job to do here so the question that came in is regarding the end buyers or the end drivers of the manufacturing and specifically if those end buyers are foundations and geos or external entities that are buying quote-unquote social products won't this continue to distort local markets and supply chains the top one on the part of Solidia so we do work both on the supplier side and the buyer side if you will with NGOs also so we have a supplier of solar lights that's a non-profit entity in the US they mainly get donated funds and they're mainly selling their products to NGOs that are donating the lights for example but basically and it is definitely going to create adverse impacts if you're then looking at the commercial suppliers of solar lights for example so what we have done is this is actually one of the case that you see in the slide and we helped them to first of all lower the manufacturing costs for the lights that was even more affordable and that light is actually on our site right now and we and they realize that their distribution reach is going to be limited if they're just working through NGOs and as donated product and that's just the reality they're significant constraints to being able to scale up distribution just working through a donation a lot of there are mosquito net suppliers that just do procurement large procurement contracts and they're able to supply a million mosquito nets for example that's all they do but with many organizations that are working on their donation based model there are limits to how much they can scale up their distribution and so with this particular client our intent is to work with them to establish more commercial channels of distribution for their product in order to actually scale up distribution even more and get their lights to more underserved communities so there is definitely an issue and a problem I would say in terms of the donated product getting out there they do interfere it's not sustainable all of those things so absolutely yes and so to the extent there's almost sort of a balancing act and it gets to the extent that we can take those issues of the engineer that help them to understand also because for them also it might be important to scale up to expand their work and to help to work with them to find ways to do that in more viable and sustainable ways. Got you. So there's a question that came in that's very specific regarding trade without borders and your engagement and you mentioned obviously a number of offered energy products the question here is has TWB been involved with supporting the procurement and manufacturing of agricultural products. Sorry other what? Agricultural. TWB been involved with agricultural products. So at this point not specifically agricultural product the thing about clean energy though is that it does cross all sectors. So we have a huge demand for example for solar water pumps primarily for application in the agricultural sector. But we're not specifically dealing with agricultural products but we are working on solar water pumps for example and the intent with trade without borders. So Solaggio has been being focused on clean energy but the intent is that once we've scaled up where Solaggio launched last year so we're in the early stages and we're looking to bring on additional financing and things like that to be able to scale it up even more. And once we get it to a certain point then certainly we have a successful model with Solaggio on the clean energy products. The idea would be to try and replicate that in other sectors and I'm open to consider what the specific product requirements are for the person working with the agricultural product. If it we can help then we will certainly try to at least point the person in the right direction. That's fantastic. I do appreciate seeing folks sending in questions so I'm going to take two more questions only or one question in a comment and I'm afraid we're going to have to start to roll out but this question came in is what would you suggest for NGOs that contract partners to conduct the work but are noticing poor quality parts, for example, poor quality PVC and galvanized pipes on the market in Uganda. So it's an NGO that has contracted partners and they are identifying that poor components are actually being integrated into projects. Yeah. I suppose that's the question about advocacy or what channel do they have to address the issue. Yeah, so I think I probably would need to get a bit more information because I'm not sure what the relationship or contract arrangement is between the NGO and their contract partner and to what extent things have been specified in terms of what is to be delivered and things like that. So if things have been specified, if that's in the contract then there might be a legal other recourse but I guess we'll need a lot more information to be able to give a proper qualified answer. I think that's entirely fair and without it I do encourage our attendees to do have additional questions for Joe to reach out either to the E4C webinar series and we will put you in touch. You should be seeing our email address on the site right now. We apologize that we can't get to all of your questions as we are approaching time but I would like to close this out with an interesting comment that I think demonstrates the power of these kinds of conversations. One of our attendees who's based in Afghanistan mentioned that there is a huge market for almost anything, any product here inside Afghanistan as not many people want to take the risk of getting involved in the country. So I have decided to take my first trip to China in a few months. This has been important advice for starters and I thank you. So Joe, with that in mind I do want to thank you for taking the time to share all of your insights with us. I think you have literally given me ideas for three more webinars around manufacturing and product development and supply chains and based on the questions that I'm seeing from the attendees I think there's strong agreement. So thank you to you for your time. Thank you to all of the attendees for joining us from all parts of the world and we're looking forward to connecting with all of you again next month and the months afterwards as part of the E4C webinar series. Take care. Bye-bye.