Please arrange production.

请安排生产 is the most consequential message you’ll send in a supplier relationship, because it converts planning into spending. Before these four characters leave your keyboard, every variable should be locked: price, specification, quantity, packaging, lead time, payment terms. The deposit should be confirmed as received. The sample (if applicable) should be approved. Once the factory receives 请安排生产, they start buying materials, allocating labor, and scheduling machine time — costs that can’t be un-spent if you change your mind.

The factory shorthand for this moment is 排产 (pái chǎn) — literally “arrange/schedule production,” meaning your order has been entered into the production queue. This is an insider term worth using: 可以排产了 (can schedule production now) or 排产了吗 (has it been scheduled?) mark you as someone who speaks factory Chinese. A factory manager might reply 已经排产了 (already in production) or 下周排产 (scheduled for next week), giving you a more precise picture of where your order sits in the queue than 在生产 (in production), which can mean anything from “materials ordered” to “halfway done.”

The production schedule request — 发一下生产排期 (send me the production schedule) — is worth making right after giving the go-ahead. A proper 生产排期 breaks the production into phases: material procurement (备料), production start (上线), first piece inspection (首件确认), production completion (下线), quality inspection (质检), and packaging/shipping (包装出货), each with estimated dates. This schedule gives you checkpoints: if material procurement was supposed to take 3 days and it’s been a week, something’s off. The schedule also signals to the factory that you’re tracking progress, not just waiting passively. Factories with multiple clients prioritize the buyers who follow up, not the ones who go silent after placing the order.