{"id":3563,"date":"2026-10-21T22:05:46","date_gmt":"2026-10-22T10:05:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/footworklab.net\/?p=3563"},"modified":"2026-10-22T15:02:23","modified_gmt":"2026-10-23T03:02:23","slug":"foot-scanner-manufacturer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/footworklab.net\/fr\/news\/3563\/","title":{"rendered":"Buying From a Foot Scanner Manufacturer: Questions That Separate a Factory From a Reseller"},"content":{"rendered":"
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About the author<\/strong> \u2014 FOOTWORK LAB is a manufacturer of foot assessment equipment and custom orthotic insoles, based in Ruichang, Jiangxi Province, China. Founded in 2014, with its own production plant since 2018. Certified to European Union and ISO quality system standards. See the factory<\/a> or view certification<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The most expensive mistake in this category is not choosing the wrong machine; it is choosing a supplier who cannot open one.<\/strong> A reseller can sell you a working unit at a fair cost and look after you well for a year. What a reseller cannot do is change a mounting plate, alter a capture routine, replace a board from stock, or tell you why a unit built in March behaves differently from one built in September. Those four capabilities are what you are actually buying when you buy from a manufacturer, and none of them appear on a quotation.<\/p>\n

The difficulty is that the two business models look identical from the outside. Both publish a product page, both answer an enquiry within a day, both can arrange a video demonstration, and both will describe themselves as a professional supplier of foot assessment equipment. The difference sits behind the sales conversation, in who owns the drawings, who holds the spares and who is on the other end of the phone when something goes wrong in a clinic at eight in the evening.<\/p>\n

This article is a question list. Not because question lists are clever, but because a supplier’s answers to specific, slightly awkward questions reveal the structure of the business faster than any brochure. We build the F2 and FMP lines ourselves, so we have a stake in this comparison. We have also lost orders to trading companies quoting a lower figure, which is a fair outcome when the buyer knows what they are trading away.<\/p>\n

What a reseller can and cannot do for you<\/h2>\n

Start by being fair to the model. A good reseller adds real value: local stock, local language, local service response, and a contact you can reach without a twelve-hour time difference. For a clinic buying one unit and using it in a standard way, that can be the better purchase even at a higher figure. Distribution exists because it solves a real problem.<\/p>\n

The limit arrives with anything non-standard. If your room layout needs the plate at a different height, if your workflow needs the capture sequence changed, if your software has to talk to a patient record system, or if a component fails and you need it this week rather than next month, the reseller has to go back to the factory. That round trip is where the delay lives, and it is invisible at the point of sale.<\/p>\n

There is also an information limit. A reseller knows the product as a product: what it does, what it costs, what the lead time is. They often do not know why a particular assembly was chosen, what the tolerance is on a load cell, or which firmware version addressed which issue. When your unit behaves oddly in month fourteen, the difference between talking to someone who knows the answer and someone who will ask on your behalf is measured in weeks.<\/p>\n

None of this means a reseller is dishonest. It means the model has a boundary, and a buyer should know where it sits before signing rather than discovering it during the first fault.<\/p>\n

Questions only a factory can answer well<\/h2>\n

Ask who writes the software. A factory will name a team, describe how often the analysis software is revised, and explain how an update reaches a unit in the field. A trading company will describe the software as a feature of the product and will not be able to tell you who maintains it. Our own connected units take over-the-air updates, which is only possible because the software is ours.<\/p>\n

Ask who owns the drawings and the tooling. For anything with a moulded or machined part, this question decides whether a modification is a two-week job or impossible. If the tooling belongs to a third party, the supplier cannot change the part without that third party’s agreement, and your customisation request becomes a negotiation you are not part of.<\/p>\n

Ask what happens when a board fails. A manufacturer holds spares or can build one; a reseller orders one. Ask how long a replacement takes to reach you, and ask whether the answer is measured from their warehouse or from the production line, because the two numbers can differ by weeks.<\/p>\n

Ask who tests the unit before it leaves. Our machines run for seven days before dispatch, and the point of the question is not the number \u2014 it is whether the supplier can describe what the test involves. A supplier who says “we test every unit” without being able to describe the routine is repeating a phrase. A supplier who can describe what is checked, in what order, and what happens when something fails, is describing a process they have seen.<\/p>\n

Ask how many units a day they can build. Our line runs at three to five units a day, which is a small number and an honest one. A trading company answering this question will either invent a figure or deflect. Neither answer is fatal on its own, but the deflection tells you where the production knowledge sits.<\/p>\n

Ask whether you can buy a single unit. We accept orders from one machine, and that is a structural fact rather than a generous gesture: a factory with its own line does not need a volume commitment to justify a build slot. A supplier whose minimum is a container is telling you that the unit is being bought in.<\/p>\n

\"FMP
FOOTWORK LAB FMP pressure & posture customization system. Product photography of our own output; specifications are confirmed in writing before an order.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Reading the answers: language that gives the model away<\/h2>\n

Certain phrases recur in trading-company correspondence and almost never in factory correspondence. “We have our own factory” followed by an inability to describe the floor is the classic. “Our engineer will confirm” is fine once; used for every technical question, it means the engineer is elsewhere and probably belongs to someone else.<\/p>\n

Watch for the passive voice around production. “The units are produced to a high standard” says nothing. “We assemble the plate, calibrate it, and run the seven-day test before packing” says who does what. The second sentence is harder to produce if you have not stood on the floor.<\/p>\n

Watch for the conflation of certification and capability. A supplier who leads with document scans but cannot explain what the certified process covers is showing you paper. Ask which part of the process the quality system applies to, and what the internal record looks like. Our certification scope is limited to what we hold \u2014 European Union certification and ISO quality system certification \u2014 and we would rather state that boundary than trade on an impression.<\/p>\n

Watch for the demonstration that avoids the ordinary output. Every supplier will show the most impressive screen the software can produce. Ask to see the report a practitioner actually prints on a normal Tuesday, with a normal client, using the default settings. If the demonstration cannot produce that on request, the impressive screen is doing the selling.<\/p>\n

Finally, watch for the answer to “what can this machine not do”. A factory knows the boundary intimately, because they have taken the support calls. A trading company often does not know where the boundary is, so it promises past it. The promise is not usually a lie; it is ignorance with a friendly tone.<\/p>\n

Auditing a supplier you cannot visit<\/h2>\n

Most buyers will not travel to see a line before a first order, and that is reasonable. A remote audit takes an hour and answers most of the structural questions. Ask for a live video call, not a recorded tour, and ask them to walk from the receiving area to the dispatch area without a script.<\/p>\n

Ask to see the test area. Units under test should be visible, with some record of what stage each one is at. Ask what happens to a unit that fails and where it goes. Ask to see the spares shelf: a factory that supports its own machines has one, and its contents tell you which parts are expected to wear.<\/p>\n

Ask to speak to an engineer rather than a salesperson, for ten minutes, on a technical question you have prepared in advance. The question should be one where the answer is a trade-off rather than a specification \u2014 how the plate behaves when a client stands on one leg, what the software does when the capture is unstable, how the unit handles a power interruption mid-session. A real engineer will answer with qualifications. A salesperson will answer with confidence.<\/p>\n

Ask for two customer references in different countries and contact both. Ask them what broke, not what they like. Every installed base has failures; a supplier whose references cannot name one is choosing your references for you.<\/p>\n

Ask for the legal entity name and the registration details, then check that the entity on the quotation is the entity that holds the certification. This takes ten minutes and catches the most common structural mismatch in the category, where the brand, the trading company and the factory are three different organisations and only one of them can help you in year three.<\/p>\n

\"FMP
FOOTWORK LAB FMP pressure & posture customization system. Product photography of our own output; specifications are confirmed in writing before an order.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The commercial structure that follows from the model<\/h2>\n

Minimum order quantity is the clearest signal. A factory with its own line can accept one unit, because a build slot is a build slot. We also accept ODM on equipment, which means a buyer can bring a configuration, a housing finish or a market-specific build and have it produced. Machine OEM is a different conversation and is negotiated case by case, because it involves tooling, branding and volume commitments that do not belong in a standard quotation.<\/p>\n

Lead time should be explainable rather than merely stated. Ask what the lead time is made of: component purchasing, assembly, test, packing, freight. A supplier who can break it down is managing a line. A supplier who quotes a single number is quoting a promise. Our own dispatch runs on express at six to seven working days, air freight at ten to twelve days, and sea freight at thirty to thirty-five, and which one applies to your order depends on the destination and on how much you are willing to wait.<\/p>\n

Warranty terms should be specific about what is covered. Ours runs twelve months on non-human damage with free replacement parts, and the phrase “non-human damage” is doing real work in that sentence: it distinguishes a failed component from a unit that has been dropped, flooded or run from the wrong supply. Ask any supplier to define their exclusions in writing. The definition tells you how a claim will actually be handled.<\/p>\n

Support structure matters more than support language. Ask what channel you will use, who is in it, and what the response expectation is. Each of our units arrives with a dedicated WhatsApp group that includes our engineers, and remote assistance is available where the site allows it. That is a deliberately unglamorous arrangement, and it exists because a group chat with the person who built the machine resolves most problems in an afternoon.<\/p>\n

Ask about the second unit before you buy the first. A supplier who can describe how a two-room or three-room installation is kept consistent \u2014 same software version, same calibration approach, same report format \u2014 is thinking about a fleet rather than a sale. That is the manufacturer’s advantage, and it is worth asking for even if you only intend to buy one machine today.<\/p>\n

What the choice actually costs over five years<\/h2>\n

The invoice is the smallest line. The larger costs are downtime, delay and the cost of a question that cannot be answered. A machine that sits idle for three weeks waiting for a part has cost more than the difference between two quotations, and the arithmetic is easy to do once you put a number on a day of lost appointments.<\/p>\n

Customisation is the second cost. A clinic that needs a different mounting height, a different report layout or an integration with an existing record system will pay for that once if the supplier can do it, and will pay for it forever if the supplier has to broker it. Ask what a change costs and who performs it. If the answer involves a third party, budget for the coordination as well as the work.<\/p>\n

The third is the knowledge transfer that never happens. A factory can train your staff on the ordinary operation and explain the failure modes they will meet. A reseller can train the operation but not the failure modes. That gap shows up as unnecessary service calls, and each one costs a day of use even when it is resolved remotely.<\/p>\n

The fourth is resale and continuity. Equipment backed by a manufacturer holds its place in a clinic’s planning because the next unit will match the last. Equipment bought through an intermediary that later changes hands becomes an orphan, and orphaned equipment gets replaced earlier than it needs to be. None of this argues against distribution, which has its own real advantages. It argues for knowing which model you are buying, and asking the questions above until the answer is unambiguous.<\/p>\n

\"FMP
FOOTWORK LAB FMP pressure & posture customization system. Product photography of our own output; specifications are confirmed in writing before an order.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Frequently asked questions<\/h2>\n
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How do I tell a factory from a trading company?<\/h3>\n

Ask who writes the software, who owns the tooling, who runs the pre-delivery test and how many units a day the line produces. A factory answers all four with specifics. A trading company usually answers the first two vaguely and deflects the last.<\/p>\n

Can we order just one machine?<\/h3>\n

Yes. Machine orders start at one unit. A factory with its own line does not need a volume commitment to schedule a build, so a single unit for a single room is a normal order rather than a special favour.<\/p>\n

Do you accept ODM on equipment?<\/h3>\n

We accept ODM on machines. Machine OEM is negotiated separately, because it involves tooling, branding and volume commitments that do not belong in a standard quotation. Insoles are different: we accept both ODM and OEM there.<\/p>\n

What does the pre-delivery test involve?<\/h3>\n

Every machine runs for seven days before it leaves the factory. Beyond the duration, what matters is whether a supplier can describe what is checked during it. Ask that follow-up question, because the routine is where the real answer sits.<\/p>\n

How many units can you build in a day?<\/h3>\n

Our line runs at three to five units a day. That figure is deliberately modest, and it is one reason we can test each unit for a week before dispatch rather than testing a sample.<\/p>\n

What support do we get after delivery?<\/h3>\n

A dedicated WhatsApp group with our engineers, direct access rather than a ticket queue, remote assistance where the site allows it, and over-the-air updates for connected units. Warranty runs twelve months on non-human damage with free replacement parts.<\/p>\n

Can we visit the plant before ordering?<\/h3>\n

Yes, and we would rather you did if the order is significant. If travel is not practical, ask for a live video walk from goods-in to dispatch. A recorded tour is not the same thing, because it cannot answer a question you think of while watching.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

What we would do next<\/h2>\n

Send us the four questions you would ask any supplier and we will answer them in writing, including the ones where the answer is not flattering. The F2 and FMP product page<\/a> sets out what the line does \u2014 pressure-sensing plate, camera posture capture and analysis software; the factory page<\/a> shows how production is organised; and the certification page<\/a> states exactly what we hold. If cost structure is your next question, our guide to what drives the cost of a foot scanner<\/a> explains the components without quoting figures.<\/p>\n

This article is intended for professional and educational reference. It is not medical advice. Foot assessment equipment produces measurements and images; clinical interpretation and any decision about care remain the responsibility of a qualified professional. Certification scope is limited to the documentation we hold: European Union certification and ISO quality system certification.<\/em><\/p>\n

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