Who uses this service? Importers, retailers, sourcing houses, and their supply chain partners can use our services to ensure that professional, independent on-site audits and assessments are conducted.
Why use this service? Our factory assessments can help you pre-qualify, evaluate, track, and monitor the ongoing performance of your suppliers throughout your supply chain. We offer a full-range of services to help you design, develop, and implement an independent auditing, reporting, and training program to both monitor and facilitate the continuous improvement of your suppliers’ processes and product quality.
Factory Assessment: Technical
Who uses this service? Retailers and importers wishing to evaluate the overall performance of their vendor factories or pre-qualify them in terms of capacity and capability can use this service to independently audit facilities around the world.
When to use this service? Before choosing a specific supplier, importers and retailers can check the capability of their partner through this service. Assessing whether a potential partner can produce a product to your requirements for quantity, quality, and other factors can help ensure on-time delivery of products, improve the overall performance of your supply chain and help protect the reputation of your brand.
Why Use a Factory Assessment - Technical? Monitoring the capacity and capability of your supplier will provide you with quality information early in the production cycle to avoid product failures and improve factory performance.
Description: Our “Factory Audit-Technical” is an on-site assessment of a facility’s production capacity and capability in meeting specific customer needs.
In addition to helping you pre-qualify the capacity and capability of factories, the findings and recommendations from the on-site assessment provide a useful mechanism to help you proactively encourage factories to adopt best practices and embrace a strategy of continuous improvement. The scope of the assessment includes:
Physical environment and equipment
Existing quality control system (incoming material control, in-process control, final inspection, and packaging)
Handling of non-conforming material
Communication and personnel
Document control and workflow
Handling of complaints
Training and education
The assessment will cover the reporting of general information provided by the factory, such as monthly production capabilities, machinery involved, main products produced, and in-house/ outsourced operations. This is a process whereby the supplier takes full ownership and responsibility for quality compliance and process optimization, and is a preventive action to uncover potential risk of non-conforming product being made.
Our assessment methodology provides a systematic on-site review of a facility and its management system and practices towards clients’ requirements. For each area being assessed, we crosscheck data through visual observation, factory tours, management interviews, and documentation review.
Factory Assessment: Global Standard-Consumer Products
Who uses this service? Retailers and importers wishing to evaluate and compare the overall performance of their vendors’ factories in terms of Quality Management and Risk Assessment Systems can use this service to independently audit facilities around the world based on a globally accepted standard.
When to use this service? To manage your supplier base on an ongoing basis. This process helps importers and retailers to verify the reliability of their partner against overall performance to a globally accepted standard and provides an excellent tool to pre-qualify, monitor supplier performance, and facilitate continuous improvement.
Why use a FA-GSCP Assessment? Monitoring the performance of your supplier will help you evaluate the risk profile in terms of implementing Quality Management, Good Manufacturing processes (GMP), Product and Process Control and Personnel.
Description: Our “FA-GSCP” Factory Assessment is a general on-site assessment of a facility's Quality System and is performed using a comprehensive Auditing and Reporting tool developed by Bureau Veritas Consumer Products Services (BVCPS), based on the “Global Standard for Consumer Products” (GSCP).
The “Global Standard for Consumer Products” is based on the British Retail Consortium (BRC) standard, which was originally developed as a technical standard for companies supplying retailers with private label food products to assist them in the fulfilment of their legal obligations and protection of consumers. Since then the standard has been adapted to other non-food sectors of the retail industry. The standard has been developed to promote product safety, legality, and quality, but does not encompass requirements in relation to staff health and safety, environmental, or ethical issues.
We have developed a scorecard approach, which allocates risk weighting to questions and assigns a weighting to the sections of the standard to allocate importance to the results. The checklist is based on the “GSCP” and is supplemented by Industry-specific questions for the process control elements for the Electrical and Electronics category amongst many others.
The Bureau Veritas “GSCP” program is supplemented with training material on the standard and the risk assessment technique employed (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point or HACCP), which is offered to vendors and factories on a voluntary basis. The training material will give guidance to facilities wishing to implement a disciplined engineering and logical risk assessment technique to manage critical quality and safety items and ensure this is effectively implemented.
Benefits of using the BV "GSCP" Scorecard approach:
The “Global Standard – Consumer Products” was developed by retailers for retailers and is based on proven standards and techniques such as ISO 9000, HACCP, and GMP principles.
Integration of process-specific requirements will ensure the BVCPS program is sector-specific.
The HACCP technique is a proven engineering approach to risk management and process improvement based on Failure Mode Effect Analysis (FMEA). It encourages (Critical) Control and Quality Points in the business to be identified and management processes to be put in place to control these from raw material specifications to finished product.
A scorecard enables vendors to track factory performance, allocate resources and money spent to correct problematic suppliers and issues, and encourages the adoption of best practices.
The factory scorecard provides the critical information necessary to determine the risk profile of a particular factory and the corresponding audit frequency.
The Scope of the "FA-GSCP" Assessment Covers the Following:
Quality Management Systems: Management systems, policy, organizational structure, management review, resource management, internal audit, purchasing, document control, and records.
Factory environment standards: Perimeter and grounds, layout and product flow, equipment, maintenance, staff facilities, physical, chemical and biological contamination, housekeeping and hygiene, waste disposal, pest control, transport, storage and distribution.
Product control: Hazard and risk management, product design and development, packaging, testing, stock rotation, foreign body detection, product release, and non-conforming product.
Process control: Control of operation, quality control, reference samples, equipment and process validation, calibration, and specific handling requirements.
Personnel: Personnel hygiene and training.
Factory Assessment: Security Assessment
Who uses this service? The importers of any merchandise shipments going to the US. This service can help support their declaration to US Customs that their factory facility and staff are set up and trained to avoid potential security risk according to Customs - Trade Partnership against Terrorism (C-TPAT) Guidelines. C-TPAT is a voluntary business program in the US aimed to strengthen security of global supply chain and borders in the transportation of persons, cargo and commercial process. This service is available in Asia to assist those manufacturing and/ or shipping consumer products to the US.
When to use this service? For C-TPAT members wishing to demonstrate to US Customs that their factory “supplies” outside of the US are being audited and monitored in accordance with the guidelines established by C-TPAT.
Why use a Security Assessment? By using a third-party audit company to assess suppliers, importers of merchandise into the US can be assured of an independent assessment report that can be presented to US Customs to demonstrate compliance. In doing so, complying members can enjoy the privilege of C-TPAT, which includes preferential clearance of containers at US port and reduction of potential clearance delays associated with high risk countries or security alerts.
Description: Our Security Audit is a systematic on-site assessment of a facility’s Security Management System in accordance with a standard checklist established by BVCPS in accordance with the guidelines established by the C-TPAT.
The scope of the assessment covers a number of elements including:
Facilities
Procedural security
Physical security of facility and cargo
Access control
Personnel screening and security training.
C-TPAT is a joint government-business initiative to build cooperative relationships that strengthen overall supply chain and border security. Under C-TPAT guidelines international trade partners are required to conduct comprehensive security assessments of their supply chains.
Top 10 Major Non-Compliances - Factory Assessments
No formal training programs provided to key quality personnel and absence of proper training records.
Machinery not periodically maintained, calibrated, and checked for operational efficiency.
The inspection and measurement equipment not periodically calibrated or no proper calibration records. (Especially the internal calibration records).
No appropriate Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) is provided to the workers. For example, the factory did not provide protective metal gloves for the fabric cutting machine operator.
No or insufficient quality control procedure on its products are provided. For example, the factory does not provide adequate QC manual, work instruction, and sample for the QC/ employee as a guideline in the workstation/production line.
No or inadequate supervision on the sub-contracted process/operation. For example, factory does not send its Quality staff to the sub-contractor site to monitor the quality issues.
The inspection records are not properly used in the data analysis process. For example, products defects are not counted, charted, analyzed, and monitored in order to improve the product quality.
For softline factories, e.g., garment manufacturers, no formal procedure for broken needle control (i.e., keeping broken needle records, calibrating and operating the conveyor type metal detector, passing garments through the detector prior to packing, etc.).
No formal customer complaint handling procedure is in place and the complaint records are usually not maintained adequately.
The non-conforming material or products are not properly identified and segregated at all stages
Corporate Social 
Who uses this service? Importers, retailers, sourcing houses, and their supply chain partners can use our services to ensure that professional, independent on-site audits and assessments are conducted.
Additional Inspection Services