The company I work for recently brok sourcing out as a separate discipline with a VP that reports to the CEO. My last trip to China I traveled with the VP of sourcing and the SVP of engineering. The three of us together traveling around China and seeing potential new partners was really great and it made me appreciate what that function can do… essentially a walking Rolodex of connections. Having an entire department like that is really important so they are not beholden to QA or engineerings (how we did things yesterday with a focus on repeatability) and instead are focused on always finding a partner who can do something more and coaching existing partners on what needs to be done to be competitive. Could a designer do this? Sure, I know some that do, but it is nice to have someone you can trust to do it for you so you can focus on designing the best solution possible. The power of working together was really obvious. On that trip we designed 3 products from scratch as well as working on existing programs. One was debuted at CES and will be available for sale in the coming weeks. 7 month sketch to shelf for a product of medium level complication I’d say, but we found the right factory partner.
Sorry, I’ve gone a little OT. I’ve never really had the opportunity to work with local manufacturing, and as was stated, a lot f the knowledge has moved. You would be surprised how many Asian shoe factories had a at least a couple of Italian shoe experts on staff to help design production lines and make changes for production. In some cases the knowledge is actually physically relocating.