What Are the 25 Points to Verify Before a Reorder Ships?

A checklist is not a quality system, and it is worth saying so before listing anything. It is a memory aid for the one moment that matters - the hour before the cartons are sealed, when somebody has to decide whether this lot is the same as the last one and has about twenty minutes in which to decide it.

What makes a checklist useful is that it is finite, grouped and applied at the same point, in the same order, on every run. Twenty-five lines in five groups fit on one sheet, take an hour, and cover the failure modes that actually occur on a repeat rather than the ones that sound impressive. A list that nobody completes is worse than no list, because it produces a sheet that reads as assurance.

Put a header on the sheet with the style, colourway, revision, run number, lot size, sample size and date. Six fields, and they are what let the sheet be found and read a year later without anyone having to work out which run it belonged to.

How Is the Checklist Organised?

Five groups of five: documents, materials, measurements, construction, and packing with evidence. The grouping matters because a reader who finds a fail in the materials group knows where to look next, and because five groups are easier to complete than twenty-five unrelated lines.

Each line carries a pass or fail column and, where the line is measured, a reading column. A checklist with only ticks is a checklist that cannot be reviewed later, because it records a conclusion and not the evidence behind it. Where a line is measured, the reading is the point of the line and the tick is only the summary of it.

The list is written for a repeat rather than for a first order, which is why it contains no drawing checks and no development questions. On a first order most of these lines do not exist yet, and the checklist that replaces them asks entirely different questions.

What Are the Five Document Checks?

The revision cited on the order matches the revision in force. The component register is current. The change log has an entry for every material or trim difference. The retained reference is the one for this revision. And the previous comparison sheet is to hand.

Those five are the least costly on the sheet and the most often skipped, because none of them requires touching the goods. They are also the five that decide whether anything found later can be interpreted, so they come first.

Materials are also the group where a fail is most likely to be a substitution rather than a defect. That matters because the response is different: a defect is sorted out of the lot, while a substitution has to go through the change log, which takes a decision by both owners rather than an hour with a sorting table.

What Are the Five Material Checks?

Body fabric against the retained panel. Lining against its reference. Padding or foam against the retained offcut and the certificate. Webbing and thread against their registered codes. Fasteners and hardware against the retained pieces.

Compare each of the five by the method written on the tolerance table rather than by eye alone: shade by instrument with a gray scale fallback, foam by thickness at named points, hardware by code and by a fit check in the mating part. A material check performed by eye is a material check that will pass a substitution.

Order the measurements so the quickest come first. Mass takes seconds and catches the widest range of problems, so it belongs at the top of the group, with the slower and more specific readings underneath it.

What Are the Five Measurement Checks?

Dimensions at the named points. Mass of the finished bag. Foam thickness where the style has padding. Stitch density at the named positions. Artwork position measured from two fixed edges.

Dimensions

Steel rule or calliper, bag empty and laid flat, at the named points

Mass

Scale, empty bag, recorded in grams against the reference unit

Foam thickness

Calliper, uncompressed, five named points on three panels

Stitch density

Count over the stated length at the named positions

Artwork position

Distance from two fixed edges, against the retained printed panel

Record the reading on every line rather than a tick. Five readings take an extra ten minutes and they are what let the next run be compared with this one, which is the difference between an inspection and a programme record.

Where a style has a welded or a moulded element, add a check for it rather than assuming the seam checks cover it. A weld fails differently from a seam, and the first sign is usually a change in the appearance of the weld line rather than an open seam.

What Are the Five Construction Checks?

Seam type matches the seam map. Reinforced points are present: handle attachment, strap anchors, base corners, zipper ends. Assembly sequence matches the specification. Handle attachment carries the specified stitch pattern. And the closure opens and closes through its full travel under a light load.

The last one is the only functional test on the sheet and it is worth doing on five units rather than one. A closure that works once and binds on the fourth try is a fastener problem that a single test will miss, and it is exactly the kind of problem a customer discovers in the first week of use rather than at goods-in.

Packing is the group most often dropped when time is short, and it is the group the customer sees first. A carton that arrives with the wrong marking, or with the units folded differently from the approved method, produces a complaint before anyone has looked at the bag.

What Are the Five Packing and Evidence Checks?

Carton size and marking match the packing specification. Folding and packing method match the approved one. Labels and barcodes are correct and legible. The required documents are packed or attached. And a retained unit has been taken and dated.

Set a time allowance and stick to it. An hour is realistic for twenty-five lines on one sample; a checklist that takes half a day is a checklist that gets filled in from memory at the end of the shift, which is the version that catches nothing.

Two further checks are worth adding to any list on a repeat programme, and neither appears in the five groups because they belong to the run rather than to the unit: that a first-piece sheet exists, and that a retained unit has been taken and dated before the cartons close.

How Is the Checklist Applied at Inspection?

On the inspection sample, at the comparison station, before the cartons are sealed, in one pass per group. The document checks happen first and before anything is opened; the material and measurement checks happen on the sample; the packing checks happen on the packed cartons.

One person should complete the sheet and another should sign it. Two signatures take a minute and they are what makes the sheet evidence rather than a note, in the same way they do on a first-piece sheet. Where only one person is available, the sheet should say so, because a single signature invites the question of who checked it.

One rule keeps the sheet honest: a fail is recorded whether or not it is acted on. A sheet where every line passes is either a very good run or a sheet that was filled in afterwards, and the reader usually knows which from the readings.

What Counts as a Fail on the Checklist?

A fail is a line outside its band, a registered item that is not the registered item, or a document that does not match. Three kinds, and each has a different response: a measurement is held and re-read, a material is a substitution and goes to the change log, and a document mismatch is corrected before shipping.

Photograph the sheet once and store the image with the run record. Paper goes missing, cupboards get moved, and a photograph of a completed sheet is enough to answer most questions that arrive a year later about what was actually checked.

How Is the Completed Checklist Filed?

With the comparison sheet, against the run number and the revision. One file per run, and the checklist is the index to it: a reader who opens the file sees the five groups, the readings and the conclusion on the first page.

Keep the completed sheets for the life of the style. A programme with four years of checklists can answer questions about its own history that no specification can, and it is the fastest way to see whether a problem is new or has been emerging for a while.

Keep the sheet to one page even if that means moving detail elsewhere. A checklist that runs to three pages stops being a checklist and becomes a document that somebody reads once at the start of the season and never opens again.

Review the sheet with the people who use it rather than for them. The inspector knows which lines are dead and which failure modes are missing, and that knowledge is almost never written down anywhere else.

What Should Be Dropped From the List?

Anything that has never once failed. A line that has passed on every run for three years is not controlling anything, and keeping it costs attention that belongs on the lines that do move. Review the list annually and cut what is dead.

Equally, add lines that have failed. A checklist is a record of what this programme gets wrong, and a line added after a failure is worth more than five inherited from a template that was written for a different product.

A last practical note: keep a blank copy of the sheet with the spec file, not in the inspector folder. The checklist belongs to the style rather than to the inspection, and it should travel with the revision it was written for.

Frequently Asked Questions

People Also Ask