A receiving inspection report should capture the part, lot and quantity, the supplier and purchase order, what you checked and how many pieces, the result in numbers, and the decision with a name on it. Inspect before the skid moves and decide hold, accept or reject at the dock. A certificate of conformance is what the supplier says about the lot; receiving inspection is what is in the box.
It's 6:50 on a Wednesday morning. A truck backs up to dock 3 with 4,000 flange bolts from Dunmore Fastener Co., lot 55102. The assembly cell is running short, and the shift lead is already asking when the bolts will be on the line.
Most plants treat receiving as a counting job. Count the boxes, match the packing slip, move the skid. That works until the day the lot is wrong. By then the skid has moved, and the only evidence is a number someone wrote on a slip.
Inspect before the skid moves
The receiving inspection report is where a bad lot first shows itself, so it is the first record in the trail. A good one captures the same things every time:
- Part number, lot number and quantity, copied from the label and the packing slip, not from memory.
- The supplier's name and the purchase order.
- What you checked, how you checked it, and how many pieces you checked.
- What you found, in numbers, not just pass or fail.
- The decision (accept, hold or reject) and who made it.
Check more than the one thing
Start with the paperwork, because it is quick: the label, the packing slip and the purchase order should all agree on part number, lot number and quantity. Then look at the box and the parts: damage, mixed parts, wrong or missing markings, rust or contamination. Then measure the characteristics your control plan says to check at receiving. For FB-8120 that is the thread, checked with a go/no-go gage, plus a visual check of the head and the finish.
How many pieces, and what the count means
Receiving pulled 32 pieces from the lot, the sample this plant uses for a lot this size. Your own sample plan sets yours, so use it. A sample is a window into the lot, and a bigger window shows you more of it.
Six of the 32 would not accept the go gage. Six in 32 is nearly one in five, so this is not a handful of strays. It points at how the lot was made. A defect rate that high in the sample also means the lot almost certainly holds many more bad pieces than the sample caught. Do not extend the sample to talk yourself into an accept. The lot is not acceptable, and the count says so.
Decide before it leaves the dock
There are three outcomes at the dock. Accept when the sample meets your plan. Reject when it clearly does not. Hold when you need more information before you decide, such as a measurement you want to repeat or a question for engineering. A lot in doubt gets held, with a tag, in a marked place, until someone with the authority decides. Holding and tagging takes minutes. Moving a suspect lot costs a containment later.
Name who decides. If the person who checked the parts is not the person who can reject a lot, the report should say who gets the call and how fast.
The certificate does not replace the check
A certificate of conformance tells you what the supplier says about the lot. It is useful, because it names the lot and the material and shows what they claim. It does not tell you what is in the box. A lot can arrive with a perfect certificate and a bad thread. If you only read the certificate, you are inspecting the supplier's confidence, not the parts.
The mistake to avoid
Reading the paperwork and calling it inspection. The other common one: writing down only pass or fail. A report that says "fail" cannot be used to tell a supplier how bad it was. A report that says six of 32 can.
- Pull the last three receiving reports.
- Check each one for part, lot, sample size, method, result and decision.
- If the sample size or method is missing on any of them, add a field for it this week.
Open the printable Monday Board
Related on ShopFloorOps
The supplier, the part, the lot and the people in this book (Dunmore Fastener Co., FB-8120, lot 55102) are a made-up example. The tool sidebars show ShopFloorOps tools, which I make and sell. Every chapter teaches the step itself, so you can use your own forms.