Focus on the most important qualifiers.
Get to know their Quality management system.
Collect sustainability and factory robustness indicators.
TIME
Make sure your auditors can finish the task in a short time. Tell the factory what they need to prepare so the visit will be efficient.
MONEY
Make sure the factory is ready for the audit, so the auditors can complete it in one trip and you don’t waste money on multiple visits.
QMS
Audit the quality management system of the factory. Make sure they are able to control their quality continuously in the long term.
VIABILITY
Look for signs of a viable factory. High quality facility maintenance, healthy activity level, reasonable in process inventory and more.
THE DOTS
Take all the pieces of the puzzle you collected and put them together into one big picture. Does the picture make sense?
Getting to know people always helps.
It will only take 10 minutes to find out if we can provide the solution you need.
It might be the phone call that will inspire your success.
1.
Isn’t it better to audit a factory without a prior announcement?
When you visit good factories, it is almost impossible to audit them without coordinating in advance. An audit requires cooperation from the factory side and if the right people are not onsite the audit will not be effective. Besides, it is very impolite and will impact your future relationship with the factory negatively.
2.
You can choose between running a full audit or a brief one, depending on your circumstances. Some companies prefer a full audit to save the need of a future additional visit. Other companies prefer to run brief audits on a bigger number of factories and then run a full audit only in factories that passed the brief ones. Both ways can make sense, depending on your circumstances.
3.
Some of the most obvious disqualifiers revealed during an audit are a factory with no activity at all, finding out the factory was established less than a year ago, lack of sufficient space, QA devices or machinery, and a few other indicators. For more information please contact us.
4.
You should send to the factories team members who are experienced with QMS audits and preferably have a lead auditor certificate.
5.
If the audit was successful you can move to the next step in factory qualifying, which is testing their communication skills and their service orientation.
Have other questions? Schedule a call with us.