Tools
Two tools: where to go, and how to score what you see.
Tools are the part of this site you use rather than read. The hub finder maps your product to the Chinese cluster that actually makes it, so you choose the region before you choose a factory. The scorecard is what you fill in on the floor, so every supplier is judged on the same evidence instead of on how friendly the sales manager was.
The two tools, in the order you use them
Region first, scoring second. Picking factories before you have picked the cluster is the most common way a sourcing trip gets wasted.
How a tool differs from a guide
A guide tells you what to think about. A tool works the other way round: you bring the product or the factory, and the page hands you back a decision.
- They take your inputNeither is an article with a form at the bottom. The hub finder starts from what you make; the scorecard starts from the factory in front of you.
- No signup, nothing to installBoth are ordinary pages. There is no account, no download and no email wall between you and the answer — read them in the airport if that is when you need them.
- They stop at the boundaryThe hub finder tells you which region makes your category. It does not name a factory — naming one requires the licence, scope and capacity checks, which is the visit itself.
- Where the scorecard leadsIf you would rather have the same dimensions filled in by somebody who walks the floor for a living, that is a hosted visit, and the written report lands within 3 working days of your departure.
Which one first
Pick by what you already have, not by what sounds useful.
Both are free and neither asks for an email. The one worth opening depends on how far your trip has already got.
- You have a product and no regionUse the hub finder. Choosing suppliers before choosing the cluster produces quotes you cannot actually compare, because the two factories are pricing different labour, different material chains and different distances to port.
- You already have a shortlistUse the scorecard. The question has stopped being who exists and become which of these three, and that is answered with evidence rather than discovery.
- You are standing in the factory nowUse the scorecard on your phone, in the building. The six dimensions are all things you can see within an hour, and none of them survive being remembered at the hotel that night.
Both tools stop at a boundary on purpose. The hub finder stops at the region, because naming a factory takes licence, scope and capacity checks — that iswhat factory matching actually is. Whatever region it points you at, the destination pages say what else that cluster is good at, which matters the moment your second product is not the same animal as your first. The scorecard stops at your own judgement, because it can only score what happens on the floor, and the part that decides most deals happens before and after it — readhow we vet factories for that side. If you want the sequence end to end in one page, how it works is the whole thing.