Contract Manufacturers Editing and Proofreading Services

A product that has been made successfully for six years in one factory is moved to another. Everything documented goes with it — the drawings, the bill of materials, the specification, the test procedure. What does not go is the fourteen things the old team knew: that the fixture needs a shim on Tuesdays after the room warms up, that the adhesive from one supplier behaves differently, that you never trust the first part after a reel change. That knowledge is why the first three months go badly.

We edit what contract manufacturers and their customers produce — manufacturing transfer and technology transfer packages, process documentation and work instruction content, bill of materials and approved vendor documentation, test and inspection procedure documentation, tooling, fixture and equipment documentation, quotation and capability responses, quality agreements and responsibility matrices, engineering change request and implementation documentation, pilot build and validation documentation, and supply agreement technical schedules. Our editors work on the package that has to carry undocumented knowledge.

The manufacturing transfer package is where a product either moves successfully or is relearned expensively, and its failure is transferring the specification without the process knowledge. Everything in the formal documentation was already written; the value is in what was not. We work through these so the package includes a known-issues section written by the people who currently build it — the steps that go wrong, the parameters that drift, the components that vary between suppliers, the tests that give false failures — since this is the only part of the package that cannot be reconstructed and it is the part nobody is asked for; so every process parameter is given with its actual working range rather than its specification range, because the specification permits things the process does not survive; so the tooling and fixtures are documented with their wear condition and adjustment history, given that a fixture arriving worn and undocumented becomes the new baseline; so the approved vendors are listed with what is actually qualified and what was tried and rejected, as a receiving site will resource on price and rediscover the rejection; so the test procedure is annotated with what a marginal result means and what the operator does about it; so the acceptance criteria for the transfer are agreed in advance as measurable outcomes; and so the people who know are named and available for a stated period. Packages written this way transfer in weeks rather than quarters.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including designs, processes and customer information. We are editors rather than manufacturing or quality engineers, and we offer no view on processes, parameters or transfer readiness. What we can do is capture the knowledge that is not in the specification.