What to have on the table before a plant quality visit

Plants sometimes spend the evening before our arrival making a clean workbook. Please do not. The visit is a reading of what you already have, including the gaps. A typed summary hides the gaps.

At the gate

A host whose name is on the visitor list, a place to leave coats, and the hour we agreed — usually shift start. If the mill uses a badge, have a spare. We will not wait in the car park through a forty-minute induction video that could have been sent the week before, but we will sit through a real safety talk.

On the inspection table

The lots already in dispute, not a pretty stand-in roll. The shade card or cutting the buyer approved. GSM slips for those lots. A tape, a scale if you own one, and the light you actually use. If the table is also the packing table, say so; we will pick a quieter hour rather than invent a laboratory.

In the records room

Four weeks of repair tickets, incoming rejects, and packed-versus-cut figures. Night-shift notes in whatever notebook they live in. Buyer letters, even the angry ones. Machine IDs that match the tickets — or a confession that they do not.

People

Someone who can fetch a roll without a committee. The quality lead who will live with the briefing. The supervisor of the one line you named. You do not need the owner in the first hour. You do need the owner, or someone who can change a setting, at the closing reading.

If a lot is already on a truck, say that in the first message. We cannot read a roll that has left Georgia. We can still read the folder it left behind, which is sometimes the whole story.