Inspection Services Editing and Proofreading Services

An inspector attends a shipment of steel fittings at a port and issues a report stating the goods were inspected and found acceptable. The consignment is released, shipped and installed. When failures appear, the questions are how many of the eighteen hundred pieces were actually examined, on what basis they were selected, and whether the inspector opened cartons from the back of the container or only the ones at the door. The report records a conclusion about the consignment and nothing about the sample it was drawn from.

We edit what inspection bodies produce — inspection reports and certificates of inspection, sampling plans and lot acceptance documentation, pre-shipment and loading supervision records, witness and hold point verification records, photographic evidence logs and annotations, non-conformance reports and rejection notices, inspection procedures and checklists, client instructions and scope of inspection agreements, and inspector qualification and impartiality records. Our editors work on the report that stands in for goods nobody else will see again.

The inspection report substitutes for the physical goods once they have moved on, and its failure is a conclusion about a whole lot with no record of what was actually looked at. We work through these so the sample is stated as a number against the lot size with the method of selection, rather than left implied by a conclusion about the consignment, since a judgement drawn from twelve pieces and one drawn from two hundred are different findings and read identically without it; so where the sampled items came from is recorded — which cartons, which positions in the container, which production batches — because a sample taken from what was reachable at the door is not a sample of the lot and the distinction disappears once the goods are gone; so each characteristic actually checked is listed against what was not checked, given that a client reading "inspected" assumes everything relevant was examined; so the acceptance criteria applied are cited to the specification or standard they came from, since acceptable is the inspector's own word unless it points to a stated limit; and so the conditions of the inspection are recorded — lighting, weather, whether the container was opened fully, whether access was restricted — because these determine what could have been seen and are the first thing a dispute examines. Reports written this way still support the conclusion after the goods have sailed.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including client instructions, inspection findings and shipment details. We are editors rather than inspectors, surveyors or quality engineers, and we offer no view on acceptance decisions, sampling adequacy or technical conformity. What we can do is make sure the report shows what was actually examined.