We have hosted enough customer audits to notice a pattern: the ones that tell the customer the most are rarely the ones that spend longest reviewing documents.
A quality certificate confirms a system was documented and audited on a particular date. It does not tell you whether the shop will hold your tolerance in month eighteen of a programme. That comes from what you see on the floor. Here is what we would look at — including the things that are least flattering to us and to every other supplier.
Start in the tool room, not the office
If the supplier makes their own tooling, go there first. It is the most honest room in any component factory.
Look for:
- Dies in maintenance, not just dies in storage. A tool room where nothing is currently apart is a tool room that does not maintain tooling.
- Whether the tool room is busy. An idle tool room in a working press shop means tooling problems are being tolerated rather than fixed.
- How die history is recorded. Ask to see the maintenance record for a specific tool that has been running for years. If it exists and is legible, that tells you a great deal.
If the supplier outsources their tooling, ask what the turnaround is on a die repair and who pays for the downtime. The answers vary enormously.
On the press floor
Watch a setup if you can. It is more informative than watching production.
- How is first-article approval handled? Is a part measured and signed off before the run starts, or does the operator judge it? Ask to see the record for the job currently running.
- Where are the in-process checks? Ask what happens between operations, and who catches a die that has started to drift mid-run.
- What does the reject bin look like? Every shop has one. A supplier who shows you theirs and explains what is in it is more trustworthy than one who has tidied it away.
- Is there a standby power arrangement? In North Indian industrial belts this is not a detail. Ask what the generator covers — the whole plant or just the lights.
At inspection
This is where claims meet reality.
Ask what proportion of parts are inspected. If the answer is “100%”, ask to watch it happen and to see the records for a batch dispatched last week. Full inspection is genuinely achievable at the volumes most component suppliers run, but it should be visible, not just asserted.
Then look at the instruments:
- Are gauges calibrated, and is the calibration current? Check a date sticker at random rather than the one you are shown.
- Is there a surface plate, and is it being used? Height gauging from a proper datum is a basic capability that not every shop actually practises.
- Are go/no-go gauges available for threaded and hole features? These are cheap and they are the difference between checking threads and hoping.
The questions that reveal the most
A few questions consistently produce informative answers:
“Tell me about a recent customer complaint and what you changed.” A supplier with no complaints is a supplier who is not telling you about them. What you want is a specific incident, a root cause traced to an operation, and a change that was actually made.
“What is your on-time delivery percentage, and how do you measure it?” The measurement method matters more than the number. Against original promise date or against revised date? Those are very different figures.
“What would make you turn down my part?” A supplier who cannot name anything is either not listening or not honest. Capability has edges, and a supplier who knows where theirs are is far safer than one who says yes to everything.
“Which step in your process do you not do in-house?” Almost every supplier subcontracts something — commonly heat treatment, plating or coating. The concerning answer is not “we outsource coating”; it is “nothing”, when a walk round the plant plainly shows no coating line.
What to make of certifications
ISO 9001 is a reasonable baseline — it means procedures are documented and records are kept. It is not a statement about the parts.
IATF 16949 is a much higher bar and genuinely meaningful for automotive programmes, but plenty of capable suppliers to Tier-1s hold ISO 9001 rather than IATF. If IATF is a hard gate in your organisation, say so in the first conversation. Any supplier who is vague about which one they hold is telling you something.
Ask for certificate copies, check the certification body and the expiry date, and check the scope statement — certificates sometimes cover a narrower range of operations than the supplier’s marketing implies.
A short audit checklist
- Tool room: active maintenance, die history records, repair turnaround
- Press floor: first-article approval records, in-process check points, setup discipline
- Inspection: proportion inspected, calibration currency, surface plate and gauges in use
- Continuity: standby power coverage, material traceability, single points of failure
- Documentation: certificate scope and expiry, inspection records for a real recent batch
- Candour: a named complaint with a real corrective action, and a clear statement of what they will not take on
Our position
We hold ISO 9001:2015 covering production and inspection. We do not hold IATF 16949, and we say so on our certifications page rather than leaving it to be discovered.
We inspect 100% of parts against customer specification before dispatch, our tool room builds and maintains our own dies, and we run 144 kVA of standby generation. All of that is visible on a plant visit, which is what we would encourage before you place a first order.
Contact us to arrange one. Several of our current Tier-1 relationships started with exactly that visit.