A factory audit is worth doing for one reason: a catalogue cannot tell you where the vacuum is pulled or who owns the colour specification. The red flags that matter are not the age of the building or the tidiness of the showroom. They are the places where an answer you were given on the phone cannot be traced to a person, a machine or a record on the floor.
The five things an audit has to settle
Everything else is context. If you come back able to answer these five, the visit paid for itself.
| Question | Red flag |
|---|---|
| Where is the body formed and welded? | The stages are subcontracted with nobody on site who owns the dimensional specification |
| Where is the vacuum pulled, and how is it checked? | A vacuum line exists, but the check runs per batch instead of on the piece |
| Is the decoration in-house? | The coating or print line is a partner, and no approved limit sample is held for colour and registration |
| What does last month look like? | Inspection records exist for the day of your visit and not for any other |
| Who answers a technical question? | Every answer routes back through a salesperson, including the ones about the process |
The order to walk it in
The walk follows the material, not the building. Start where the steel arrives and finish where the record is filed, and you will have seen the whole of the process without a guide deciding which parts to skip.
- Incoming material. Ask to see a grade, thickness and surface check against a purchase specification. This is the first of the eight control points and the one an audit most often skips.
- Forming and welding. Dimensional checks at cutting and forming, with a capability check against a master sample rather than against a drawing.
- The vacuum stage. The stage that decides the product. Vacuum retention, thermal performance, leak resistance and drop testing should be running on sampled units from a batch, not on a demonstration piece.
- Coating. Powder or wet paint, and the limit samples that fix what an acceptable colour looks like. If there is no physical limit sample, two people will judge the same body differently.
- Printing. Which methods are on site and which are bought in, and what the artwork requirement is for each.
- Assembly and packing. Lid cycling, gasket fit, and the pre-shipment AQL inspection with its written report.
- The record room. Inspection records, test reports and material declarations, archived against an order number. This is what answers a customer complaint a year later.
What is not a red flag
A busy floor is not disorder. Older machines are not a defect if the output is measured. A small showroom is irrelevant, because you are not buying the showroom. The signal to listen for is specificity: a supplier who runs the process answers with numbers and stage names, and a supplier who resells it answers with adjectives. An answer of "whatever you need" is not accommodating, it means the question did not land.
Questions buyers ask
Do I have to visit, or will a video call do?
A call is genuinely useful for two of the five questions and useless for the other three. Ask for live video of the vacuum line and the print line rather than a produced film, and treat the record room as a documents request instead.
Should the audit happen before or after the first order?
Before, on any programme where a container is at stake. Afterwards the only lever left is a claim.
What should I ask for in writing afterwards?
The list of stages that are in-house, the colour tolerance, the vacuum test method, and the documents held for your market. Four lines, and they become the specification the order is measured against.
The eight checks the walk above follows are published on the quality page, and the detail behind them is on the QC checklist. If you would rather ask them of us directly, a technical enquiry reaches the people who run the line.
