What sending someone actually costs

Flights, four nights in a hotel, two days lost to jet lag, an interpreter who has never seen a terminal block: a single European engineer visiting a Japanese site rarely comes in under a few thousand euros, and that is before anyone has picked up a tool.

The larger cost is usually invisible. While the trip is being arranged, the customer is waiting. In Japan, a supplier who takes three weeks to look at a problem has already damaged the relationship, whatever the fix turns out to be.

What a local technical representative does

The role is narrow and practical. Someone qualified goes to the site in your name, looks at what is actually there, and tells you in your language:

  • attends factory or site acceptance and checks the installation against your specification;
  • witnesses commissioning and records the values that matter;
  • handles warranty and after-sales visits without a plane ticket;
  • photographs everything and sends a written report the same day;
  • speaks to the customer's engineers in Japanese, and to yours in English or French.

The language problem is a technical problem

General interpreters are excellent at meetings and dangerous on site. Site Japanese is a dialect of its own — 現場 vocabulary, abbreviations, drawings annotated by hand — and a translator who does not know what a contactor does will translate the words and lose the instruction.

That is how a phase ends up on the wrong terminal. The fix is not a better dictionary; it is having the technical discussion held by someone who would notice the error.

How to set it up so it works

Delegating site work to someone you have not met needs very little paperwork, but it needs the right paperwork:

  • a written scope — what is being checked, and against which document;
  • the specification, drawings or acceptance sheet in advance, not on the day;
  • an agreed report format, with photographs;
  • one named person on your side who can decide when something unexpected appears;
  • a clear line between what may be fixed on the spot and what must be reported first.

When it is worth it

Below roughly three site visits a year, a local representative is simply cheaper than travelling. Above that, it is usually about speed: warranty work answered in days instead of weeks, and a new Japanese customer who sees a supplier that shows up.