Goods-in: where other people’s problems become yours
A quality problem that arrives on a wagon is still your quality problem. Your customer doesn’t care that the part came in bad. The moment it crossed your threshold it became yours, along with the delay and the scrap bill that come with it.
That’s why goods-in is one of the first places I look when I’m asked about a quality system. It tells you a lot about a place. Some firms treat it as a proper gate. Plenty more treat it as a doorway: the wagon arrives, the forklift unloads, the paperwork gets signed while the driver’s still folding his straps, and the first real inspection happens weeks later when a machinist can’t get the thing to fit.
Checking at the point of use feels efficient. It isn’t. By then the bad batch is booked into stock, the good stuff’s mixed in with it, and there’s usually weeks between delivery and discovery. Try arguing a credit with a supplier for parts you signed for a month ago. That conversation only goes one way.
The fix doesn’t need a lab or a full-time inspector. It needs somebody who knows what right looks like for each thing you buy, and a couple of minutes with the delivery before it gets booked in. Count it and have a proper look at it. If it comes with a cert, glance at that too. For most materials that’s enough to catch the obvious stuff, and the obvious stuff is most of what goes wrong.
The sticking point is usually that nobody’s written down what right looks like. Ask what you’re checking a delivery of steel against and you’ll get a shrug, or you’ll get told that Dave’s been here twenty years and he knows. That works until Dave’s on holiday. Half a page per bought-in part, with the sizes that matter and what a reject looks like, turns one man’s judgement into something the business owns.
Write down what you found, even when it’s fine. Especially when it’s fine. Six months from now, when a supplier swears blind their process hasn’t changed, your goods-in records are the difference between “we think the parts got worse” and “here’s the reject rate by month”. One of those wins the argument.
When something does fail the check, it needs somewhere to go that isn’t the shelf next to the good stock. A taped-off corner and a red label will do. The point isn’t the tape, it’s making sure nobody can grab a duff part in good faith.
It changes your suppliers too. The ones who know you look tend to send you their better work. I’ve yet to meet a supplier who couldn’t tell you which of their customers actually opens the box.
Most of the manufacturers I work with are already doing a version of this. It’s just that it lives in somebody’s head rather than in the system, so it’s only as reliable as whoever happens to be on shift that morning.
If you’re not sure which side of that line your own goods-in sits on, it’s an easy thing to look at together. Book a stress-free chat and we’ll go through what you buy in and where it’s most likely to bite you.
None of this is glamorous. It’s counting boxes and looking at parts. But your quality system’s only as good as the worst thing you let through the door, and the door’s the cheapest place to catch it.