Auditing an Indian cable accessory factory

What you are actually testing

A visit that ends with photographs of clean machines has tested nothing. You went to test three claims.

The process boundary: how much of the item on your purchase order is made by the company whose name is on it. The electrical evidence: whether the reports in the vendor file came off equipment standing on this site. Traceability: whether a carton that fails in your yard walks backwards to a compound lot without a phone call.

Every question below serves one of those three. One that serves none of them costs you an hour you will want back at four o'clock.

Put this in the visit request: we will need the works address exactly as it appears on your utility approvals, and the name of the quality head who will accompany us throughout.

Testing the in-house claim on the floor, not in the brochure

"Every process from compounding to dispatch, in-house" is a genuine differentiator and a very common claim. It matters because a plant that buys its compound cannot fully explain a batch failure. It can only forward your complaint to the company that can.

Test it in the utility approval letters, not on the tour. Those were written by engineers who audited the works before you did, and their special remarks are where the exceptions live.

Worked example, from the benchmark supplier this reference is operated with. Its POWERGRID manufacturer approval, reference CC/QA&I/2021/Letter/081 dated 19 February 2021, covers cable jointing and termination kits up to 33 kV and insulation sleeves and tapes up to 52 kV class. The special remarks then require that dry curing — electron-beam radiant curing of the heat-shrinkable tubes and components — be carried out at M/s Apar Cable Solutions, Umbergaon works, with a record of traceability maintained and verified by POWERGRID at inspection.

So the in-house boundary on that item contains one named external address, disclosed by the utility rather than by any brochure. That is not a defect and not a gotcha. It is the shape of the answer an honest plant gives, and the reason the question earns its place in the agenda.

The same letter names the works address the approval attaches to, requires the specifications, drawings, data sheets, GTP and MQP to be held at the works so inspection is not delayed, and reserves the right to add customer inspection points or withdraw approval. It also carries a validity date, and that one expired in February 2022.

Ask for every approval letter in full, special-remarks page included. A summary table of approvals is not the letter, and the letter is where the useful sentence always sits. The worked example is set out on the manufacturer page.

Trace one carton backwards, while you watch

This single request separates a traceability system from a spreadsheet, and it takes twenty minutes. Put it in the agenda beforehand so nobody can claim an ambush.

• Pick the carton yourself, from the finished-goods store, not from a table laid out in the meeting room. Read the batch number off the label; from there, nothing should need a phone call.
• Ask in this order for the despatch record, the packing record, the moulding or extrusion shift log, the compound lot, and the incoming-material certificate for that lot.
• A real system produces five documents that already existed, each naming the next. A spreadsheet produces one document after lunch, typed today, with no signature older than your visit.
• Time it and write the time down. Under an hour is a system. Half a day is a reconstruction, and you now know what a failure investigation will feel like.
• Where a step happens at another company's address, the chain must cross that boundary with a record on both sides. Ask for the outgoing and the incoming record for the same lot.
• Agenda wording you can copy: one finished carton, selected at random by the visiting team, will be traced back to compound lot during the visit.

What to photograph, what to copy, what to ask last

Photograph things that carry a number. Copy things that carry a date. Ask the four uncomfortable questions when the tour is over and everyone is standing up.

• Photograph: the calibration label on the PD set and the HV set; the tool number on the mould that makes your size; the batch label on a carton you chose; the works signboard, framed so the address is legible.
• Copy: current management-system certificates with expiry dates; the manufacturing quality plan for your item; the last three internal audit reports; the incoming-material specification for the compound; every approval letter in full.
• Verify later: a photograph of a certificate is not verification. Take the number and check it with the issuing body. A UL file number, a CPRI report number and an approval reference are all independently checkable, and one of them proving unfindable is worth more than the whole day.
• Which of your approvals is currently expired, and when is the renewal expected?
• What was the rejection rate on this item last quarter, and in which document does it live?
• Which process steps for this item happen at another company's address?
• Show me a batch you rejected this year, and tell me what happened to it.
• None of those four is a trap, and all four are answerable in a plant that runs a system. Write the answers verbatim, with the name of whoever gave them.

Running it remotely, and what that costs you

When travel is impossible, run a document review first and a live video walk second, never the reverse. A plant that cannot produce the document pack in two weeks will not produce it in an hour on camera.

Insist the walk is live rather than a film. Ask the camera to hold on the works signboard, then the machine control panel, then the equipment nameplate, then a carton you pick by position — third from the left, top row. Put one unplanned question in the middle; where it goes tells you more than the answer.

A video walk cannot give you the smell of a compounding area, the noise, the temperature of the store, how many people are genuinely working, or the state of the aisles nobody routed you down. It also cannot show you a document that was never offered, and that is the real gap.

So a remote audit downgrades your assurance rather than replacing the visit. Record the downgrade in the vendor file in one sentence and carry the difference commercially: first-article inspection before bulk despatch, and a third-party inspector at the works for the first consignment.