The Factory Audit

Sample dossier

This is a sample. It is a composite drawn from real factory assessments by the principal, with the client, factory, product, location, dates and figures changed. It is not a report on any actual company. Photographs and video are left out of the public sample.

Verdict, given on the floor

Conditional

The factory can build this product. It cannot yet be trusted to build it unsupervised. Assembly and testing are real strengths. The systems around them are thinner than represented, and two findings have to be closed before more money moves: the certified site is not the site doing the work, and part of production goes to a subcontractor the client was never told about.

GoProceed. ConditionalProceed behind the gates. WalkDon't.

Before we arrived

The pre-visit investigation, from public filings and shipment records.

Registration The company that quoted and the company that manufactures are separate legal entities with one owner. The manufacturing entity is seven years old, with modest registered capital.

Premises Two floors of a shared building, leased inside an industrial park.

Shipments Export records list the quoting company as shipper on every consignment traced. Most of the traced volume is in a different product category from the client's.

Subcontractors Moulding and packaging are bought in. A third subcontractor, for surface finishing, was identified on site.

Organisation Roles mapped by function. The sales contact the client deals with has no authority over the production schedule.

Represented, versus observed

What the client had been told, against what three days on the floor showed.

RepresentedObserved

Workers on the client's lines 300 61

Moulding In-house Subcontracted, undeclared

Safety certification Held by the factory Held by an affiliate at another site

Quality plan In place No written pass or fail criteria

Sample approval Signed samples Photographs

Findings by the seven checks

Every finding reported, including the inconvenient ones. Two critical, five high.

1 Who's actually making it, and who's actually running it. Critical The quoting company does not manufacture. Production sits with an affiliated company under the same owner, and the safety certification shown to the client belongs to a different affiliate's site, not the building where the product is assembled. Moulding is subcontracted to a third company with no agreement, no confidentiality terms and no audit on file. The owner attends sales meetings. Daily decisions sit with a factory manager the client had not met.
2 Can they really build this, or did they say yes to something new? High Assembly and functional testing of this product class are in-house and competent. The housing is not. There are no moulding machines on site, and the two-colour finish specified is one the subcontractor has not run in production. Trial parts failed at the point where the design is hardest to mould. The factory said yes to something new and did not say so.
3 Is their quality control real, or paperwork? High There was no written quality plan and no documented pass or fail criteria on the floor. The manager checks product personally and records nothing. Reference samples were present but unprotected, unlabelled, and in two cases several revisions out of date. Finished parts were set down on bare benches, and few operators wore gloves.
4 How samples get approved. High Colour and finish approvals run on photographs. Across the production record, items marked approved from a photo later failed once someone held the part: a wrong finish, visible tool marks, a unit that did not sit level. Corrections pass through two language hand-offs before they reach the line, and several defects trace to that chain, not to workmanship.
5 Is compliance screened up front, or discovered late? Critical Compliance is discovered here, not screened. A restricted-substance failure in a metal fitting surfaced at lab testing only after the parts were bought, and took six weeks to clear. One compliance sample was built from a superseded design, which invalidated the test. The wireless module fitted to the pre-production unit is certified for the domestic market, not for the United States.
6 Real capacity, and where you rank. High The factory represented 300 workers on the client's programme. We counted 61 on the client's lines across three days, with a second customer's order running on the adjacent line and drawing on the same people. The daily output figure was stated verbally and could not be matched to any log. The factory's own schedule had no slack between milestones and gated the production start on the wrong test.
7 How fast questions get answered, and what ages silently. High Questions age without anyone noticing. In the record, replies owed by the factory ran from five weeks to more than six months with nothing flagging them as late. On one item the factory went ahead on its own guess. The person the client talks to is in sales and cannot commit the production floor.

The corrective gate plan

Conditions for the client to set and the factory to meet. Each is pass or fail.

1 Name the producing site. The contract, the confidentiality terms and the safety certification must cover the building where the product is made. Every subcontractor is declared before any further purchase order.
2 Signed physical samples only. Three sign-offs: first parts, colour and finish, and pre-production. No approvals from photographs.
3 A written quality plan before tooling is paid for. Pass and fail criteria the floor can use, checked by an inspector who does not work for the factory.
4 A feasibility and compliance screen, signed. Materials, process, restricted substances, wireless certification for the destination market and battery transport, cleared before more is committed.
5 One open-items list. An age counter on every line, reviewed weekly by both sides.

Also in a full dossier

Unstaged walk-through video
Photograph log, keyed to each finding
Registration and certificate documents
Subcontractor map
Organisation chart, by role
Findings as structured data
Third-party certification audit report

What a dossier is, and isn't

A dossier describes the factory as we found it on the days we were there. It is not a guarantee of future production, quality or delivery, and it does not include fixing what it finds. The decision stays with the client.

How the audit works

Next audit slot: December 2026

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