Factory audit checklist: one day on the floor

How can I tell a factory from a trading company before I wire the deposit?

Compare three names, not three photographs: the company on the business licence, the seller on the pro-forma invoice, and the beneficiary of the bank transfer must be the same legal entity. Then ask whether the sample was made on the supplier's own line, pulled from stock, or sourced from a partner, and request a live video walkthrough of the production and QC stations. A factory audit checklist is a document check first and a site visit second. How the plant is described is the reference point to hold those answers against.

What can a factory audit tell you, and what can it never tell you?

A factory audit checklist is not a formality and it is not a box-ticking exercise. Its purpose is to answer the one question documentation cannot: is the process real, or is it performed for visitors? According to the Wikipedia entry Quality audit, an audit is a systematic, independent examination of a process or system — which is exactly the test a floor walkthrough applies to a factory. Everything you see in a day should be read against that question. [Deming, 1986] argued that quality cannot be inspected into a product but has to be built into the process — an audit is the closest you get to watching that happen.

A visit is also the fourth move in a longer sequence, not the first. The factory audit checklist works best after a shortlist exists, because it verifies rather than forms. Before you book a flight you need a shortlist, and before a shortlist you need one brief sent identically to every candidate: the five stages of comparing suppliers set out what each stage is supposed to settle, so that the day on the floor is spent verifying a hypothesis rather than forming one.

What the day cannot tell you is whether the date will hold. A floor can be clean, the records complete and the line still idle next month, because "when" is a scheduling answer rather than a capability one — where the 25–35 days actually go separates the queue from the work.

Which areas of the factory should you walk, and in what order?

1. Material store. Materials should be identifiable — labelled, dated, separated by batch — not loose sacks. Ask to be shown the incoming inspection location and its records.
2. Incoming inspection bench. If it does not exist, nothing downstream can be trusted. Look for simple instruments actually in use: durometers, calipers, a scale.
3. Assembly line. Count stations and operators; note whether work instructions are posted and readable. Torquing, potting and soldering are where failures originate in this category, so look specifically at those stations.
4. Rejected parts. The most informative minute of the day. There should be a physically separate, clearly marked location for rejects, with units in it. Empty-yet-existing is plausible; absent altogether is not.
5. Testing area. Function rigs should be running on units that are in the queue, not clean and idle. Ask to see a unit being tested and the record it generates.
6. Packing and documentation. Look at a finished carton being packed and at the documents that will accompany it. Missing documents discovered here cost a day; discovered at customs they cost a shipment.

What does the shop floor show that the documents hide?

Which three questions should you ask a person instead of a document?

Documents are written once. A conversation is harder to script, so these are worth asking an operator or a line supervisor rather than the sales contact.

• "What do you do when a unit fails here?" The answer should name a bin, a record, and a person — not a shrug.
• "How do you know this batch is the material you ordered?" A plausible answer names a check performed today.
• "What did you reject most of last month?" A real process has a known failure mode and someone trying to reduce it.

If you cannot visit, commission a third party. Any inspector you appoint may attend at the factory address — including for our own range, where there is no coordination fee and no restriction on who you use. Pair the visit with the AQL inspection planning you will apply at shipment, so what you audit matches what you later accept or reject.

What can a supplier line show a visiting buyer, and what can it not?

Production runs through our manufacturing partner in Dongguan, Guangdong, operating since 2014 with tooling, assembly and quality control under one roof and no subcontracting on core components. Capacity is published at 500,000 units a month across 80+ staff including 20+ dedicated QC. Those are numbers you can check against the line: count the stations, then decide whether they are consistent with the order you intend to place. The the compliance stack behind a CE mark sets out the four inspection stages, and the due-diligence questions, as a form are the written counterpart to this visit.

What can you verify without visiting the factory at all?

Most buyers treat a factory audit as a flight. That framing wastes the three checks that cost nothing, catch more substitutions than a site visit does, and can be run this week — before you have decided whether the trip is worth taking. They are not a substitute for standing on the floor. They are the reason you arrive with the right questions instead of a clipboard of generic ones.

1. Read the documents against each other, not one at a time. The model number on the test report, on the quotation and on the carton artwork should be the same string. The address on the business licence, on the audit report and on the bill of lading should be the same address. A file where those agree is not proof of anything good, but a file where they disagree is proof of something bad, and it takes twenty minutes to check.
2. Ask for a live walk and make one request you did not prepare. A recorded factory tour is a marketing asset; a video call where you ask them to open the store cupboard and read a batch label is evidence. Ask for today's inspection log with the last three entries, ask what the reject bin held this morning, ask them to walk to the meter and show the calibration sticker. Rehearsal is exactly what an unscripted request defeats, and the discomfort it causes is information.
3. Look the entity up yourself. China's National Enterprise Credit Information Publicity System (gsxt.gov.cn, run by the market regulator) resolves a unified social credit code to a legal name, a registered address and a business scope, and a supplier whose credit code does not resolve — or resolves to a trading company at a different address — has just told you what the audit would have. If a certificate names a notified body, the EU NANDO database confirms that the number belongs to a real body and to the scope claimed. Ten minutes, no account, no fee. What the record has to show, and what most buyers never read: the legal name matching the licence, a status field that reads as active rather than deregistered or revoked, a business scope that names manufacture rather than only trade, and a registered address that matches the one on the pro-forma invoice — a mismatch there is the commonest way a deposit reaches an entity other than the one you negotiated with. Below the licence the same registry publishes an abnormal-operations list, for companies that missed a filing or could not be found at their address, and the Supreme People's Court runs a separate portal (zxgk.court.gov.cn) for companies ordered to pay a judgment and still unpaid. Both are free, and both say more than a badge: a marketplace's verified mark tells you the platform checked a document, not which building makes your goods.

What none of the three can tell you is whether the process is stable, whether the material in the store is the material you ordered, or whether the line runs your family next month. Those are the questions a visit exists for — which is why the sensible order is remote screening first, then a trip aimed at the two or three things the screening could not settle. A supplier audit built that way is shorter, cheaper and considerably harder to perform for.

Which of the three audit types is actually about the product?

The word audit covers three different exercises, and factories quote them interchangeably because most buyers do not ask which one they are being shown. A social-compliance audit examines how people are treated. A management-system audit examines whether documented processes exist and are followed. A product or process audit examines whether the thing you are buying is made the way you specified. Only the third one answers the question a buyer actually has.

How far does one day of auditing actually reach?

A day on site is a sample, and like any sample its value depends on what it was drawn from. Three shifts run in a week; you will see one. Several product families run on the same floor; you will see the one in production. That is not a reason to skip the visit — it is a reason to choose the date rather than accept the date you are offered. Ask what will be running and confirm it is the family you intend to buy.

How do you build a scorecard that compares two factories fairly?

A visit that ends in impressions cannot be compared with the visit you made last month. Fix the weights before you travel, score on the day, and the second visit becomes a measurement rather than a memory. The weights below are the ones that matter for a body-contact product with a motor and a battery; adjust them, but adjust them before you arrive.

1. Process control (30). Work instructions at the station, a parameter the operator can state, and a check that happens during the run rather than after it.
2. Traceability (20). A finished carton that can be walked back to a material batch and a shift, in under ten minutes, without a phone call.
3. Quality records (20). Reject counts that exist for dates you did not choose, including dates when the numbers were bad.
4. Capacity and scheduling (15). Whether the order you are discussing fits the calendar you can see, and what happens to it when a bigger customer arrives.
5. Housekeeping and safety (15). Not tidiness for its own sake: contamination, loose fasteners near open housings and unlabelled chemicals are the same finding in three costumes.

What should happen to an audit finding before you sign?

An audit that produces a list and no date is a report. A corrective action has three parts — what will change, who owns it, and when it can be verified — and the third is the one that is usually missing, because it commits someone to a second visit. Ask for it in writing before you leave the building; a factory that will not put a date against a finding has told you how it treats the next one.

Then close the loop at shipment rather than at the next audit. The finding and the fix should appear as a line on the pre-shipment inspection plan: if the finding was that rejects were not segregated, the inspection checks the reject bin; if it was that records were missing, the inspection asks for the batch record. An audit finding that never becomes an inspection criterion was an observation.

References

1. Deming, W. E. (1986). Out of the Crisis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Center for Advanced Engineering Study.
2. Juran, J. M. & Godfrey, A. B. (1999). Juran's Quality Handbook, 5th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill.
3. Montgomery, D. C. (2020). Introduction to Statistical Quality Control, 8th ed. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.