Guide
The checklist that separates a factory from a showroom.
A factory visit is only as good as what you verify on the floor. These are the checks that separate a real manufacturer from a well-presented trading company.
Before you arrive
What to verify before you set foot in the factory.
Remote checks
- The business licence and registered scope, matched to what they claim to make.
- The registered address — does it match where they actually want to take you?
- The scope of what is made — does the licence cover your category, or just wholesale and retail?
- A sample in hand before the visit — the visit is to verify the factory, not to discover the product.
The licence, scope and address are the first two of the five vetting checks we run before a factory stays on an itinerary.
On the floor
What to verify during the visit.
The walk-through
- 01.Walk the production floor itself, not the showroom or the conference room.
- 02.The line for your product — is it running, or is the "line" a photo from last year?
- 03.Capacity and equipment, arithmetically — machine counts and cycle time against your volume.
- 04.The quality control bench — how failures are caught, recorded and what happens to them.
- 05.The tooling store — labelled and traceable, or a mystery kept "at a partner plant"?
- 06.The warehouse and incoming-goods labels, which often reveal who really made the parts.
- 07.The decision-maker in the room — a visit with no one who can say yes is a wasted visit.
These checks map onto the factory visit scorecard — the checklist is what you look for, the scorecard is how you record it.
Questions
Four questions to ask the production manager.
- Who makes the parts we cannot see?Every factory outsources something. The question is whether they say so. An answer that is evasive here is a warning everywhere else.
- What is the real MOQ, and why?The reason behind the number — setup waste, material minimum or a number they like saying — tells you what is negotiable.
- What is the current defect rate, and where do defects go?A factory that cannot answer has no process. A factory that says "no defects" has no measurement.
- Who handles my order after I leave?The person who signs the sample is rarely the person who runs the order. Know the handoff.
- What does the sample actually prove?A sample proves the factory can make one good unit. The visit proves it can make your volume. Do not confuse the two.
Red flags
The signs that end the conversation.
A visit is not an audit or an inspection — those answer different questions, and we keep the three roles separate.
Walk away if you see these
- Refusing a live walk-through of the floor before you commit.
- The registered address is not where they want to take you, and the explanation changes.
- No production equipment in any photo, ever — only showroom and catalogue images.
- Payment details that do not match the licence entity.
These are the same signals we check for on every existing-supplier visit.
What we don't do
When to bring someone who has done this before
The checklist is a start, not a substitute for an experienced set of eyes. Some things only become visible after you have walked a hundred floors.
- Judging whether a line is really running your product, or a dressed-up set.
- Reading the difference between a real QC bench and a staged one.
- Knowing when a polite refusal is actually the factory saying it cannot make your part.
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