AMREP Raises the Roof on Chinese Solar Panel Quality

Our Client’s ‘Made in China’ Quality Problem

A Canadian energy infrastructure provider enlisted AMREP Supplier Management Services to help them prevent quality problems with their ‘Made in China’ solar panels. They had used Chinese solar panels for some of their Middle East projects and their solar panel inspections teams had found that the solar panels would have critical defects just after 2 years, whereas they were supposed to last for 25 years. This was causing them very expensive system failures that were also extremely difficult to fix.

The reasons for the quality problems were known already– the supplier was cutting costs and cutting corners; substandard materials were being used and that led to faster panel degradation. The client had their own Quality Assurance Plan but was having trouble implementing it with their Chinese supplier.

It was then that they contacted AMREP’s Solar and Photovoltaics division.

AMREP Supplier Management Services Solution

  • icon Full-time SQE presence at the supplier facility

    AMREP Supplier Management Services main solution was to station our local quality engineers full-time at the supplier to represent our client’s interests and monitor the production activities. Seeing that material substitution was an issue, we focused particularly on their incoming materials management processes and tasked our solar panel inspection teams to conduct extensive reviews and inspections of their supply sources.

    This way, we could be completely confident of what went into the solar panels and ensure that the Bill of Materials conformed to the IEC quality standards.

  • icon Supplier Quality Management System assessment

    We then assessed the supplier’s Quality Management Systems. We checked the accuracy and functionality of the supplier’s testing equipment. We also assessed the staff’s abilities in using the equipment properly.

    We reviewed the QA department’s skills and competencies in defect detection and inspections, especially for the semi-finished products arriving at the supplier for assembly. We analyzed the quality control points in the supplier’s production process to see if all the critical processes were being monitored for deviations from the customer’s specifications.

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  • icon Problem Resolution and Continuous Client-Supplier Feedback

    While our solar panel inspectors were doing the pre-shipment inspections, picking out the bad units, and providing defect reports to our client, our supplier quality engineers were using their findings and their studies of the supplier’s production processes to develop ways of permanently resolving quality defects.

    An aspect they focused on was investigating where the supplier was trying to take shortcuts in the production and report them back to the customer. The SQEs would then establish a work process between the customer, the supplier, and AMREP Supplier Management Services to identify solutions that would reduce the cost pressures for the supplier but still meet the customer’s expectations.

    We have always found that many quality problems can actually be resolved through open dialogue between all the stakeholders and that sometimes suppliers cutting costs could be due to a matter of business survival, rather than trying to deceive the customer.

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  • icon Supplier Performance Improvement

    The last thing we did was to collaborate with the supplier’s management and customer to improve production processes and quality decision-making processes. For instance, we found that although the supplier did have statistical process control methods, the quality and production managers did not know how to interpret the data properly and effectively utilize information.

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    We took them back to basics, teaching things like how to read statistics and production data analysis methods. Another activity we did was to investigate how we could automate some of the quality inspection processes to increase defect detection accuracy.

    With the advances made in cameras, sensors, and computer vision technology, we strongly believe that manual solar panel inspections should be relegated to the past.

    Contact AMREP's Solar and Photovoltaics Quality Control Division

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