Third-Party Inspection of a Pipe Shipment: What It Really Checks

Book a third-party inspection on a container of PP-R pipe and you are not buying a look at the container. You are buying a look at roughly 200 pipes out of it, chosen by a sampling table, measured against clauses you were supposed to name on the purchase order. If you did not name them, the inspector measures against whatever the supplier's own drawing says, and the report comes back clean on a shipment you would have rejected yourself.

That gap between what buyers think they are commissioning and what actually happens on inspection day is where most of the money is lost. This guide walks the whole sequence for thermoplastic pipe specifically — PP-R, PVC and HDPE — because almost everything published on pipe inspection is written for steel line pipe, where the test methods are ultrasonic testing, positive material identification and radiography. None of those touch an extruded plastic pipe. The checks that matter here are different, cheaper, and far more likely to catch a real defect.

What You Are Actually Buying When You Book an Inspection

The single most common misunderstanding in pre-shipment inspection is the word "inspection" itself. It implies looking at the goods. What you are buying is a statistical decision procedure applied to a sample, and the size of that sample is fixed by a table before the inspector leaves the office.

QIMA, one of the larger inspection bodies operating across Asia, states plainly that it applies ISO 2859-1 or its American equivalent ANSI/ASQC Z1.4. Effectively every serious agency does the same. That standard was revised this year — the current edition is ISO 2859-1:2026, published in 2026, replacing the 1999 edition that had stood for more than two decades. The important practical news for a buyer is that the mechanics did not change: the same inspection levels, the same sample-size code letters, the same acceptance and rejection numbers.

Here is how the table resolves for the lot sizes a pipe importer actually deals with, at General Inspection Level II. That level is not a convention agencies settled on — it is the standard's own fallback. Clause 10.1 of ISO 2859-1 reads: "Unless otherwise specified, level II shall be used," and adds that the level for any particular application "shall be specified by the responsible authority." Read those two sentences together and the practical point falls out: if your purchase order names no inspection level, you have not avoided the decision, you have delegated it to a default and made your supplier the responsible authority by silence.

Lot size (pipes)	Code letter	Sample size	AQL 2.5 (major) Ac / Re	AQL 4.0 (minor) Ac / Re
1,201 – 3,200	K	125	7 / 8	10 / 11
3,201 – 10,000	L	200	10 / 11	14 / 15
10,001 – 35,000	M	315	14 / 15	21 / 22

Read the second row carefully, because it is the one most 20-foot and 40-foot PP-R orders land in. Eight thousand pipes on the packing list, 200 pipes drawn as the sample, and the lot is accepted if the inspector records ten or fewer major defects among those 200. Eleven and it fails. That is the entire commercial mechanism, and it is knowable to the digit before you pay anyone.

Two consequences follow that buyers routinely miss. The first is that a "passed" inspection is a statement about a sample, not a guarantee about a container — a lot can pass with defects in it, by design, because the acceptance number is not zero. The second is more useful: because the accept number is not zero, a report showing nine major defects on a 200-pipe sample is a technical pass that should worry you far more than it reassures you. That is a defect rate implying hundreds of bad pipes in the shipment, and it passed.

Critical, major and minor — the split that decides the outcome

The AQL number is set per defect class, not for the shipment as a whole. Common practice among importers is zero tolerance for critical defects, AQL 2.5 for major and AQL 4.0 for minor. What lands in which class is a decision you make, not one the standard makes for you, and it is worth ten minutes of thought: classify wall thickness below minimum as major and the inspection has teeth, classify it as minor and you have quietly granted a 40% wider allowance on the one defect that matters most.

One more table rule is worth knowing because it occasionally works in your favour. Where the sampling plan cell contains an arrow, you use the first sampling plan below or above the arrow as directed — and if the resulting sample size equals or exceeds the lot size, the rule is 100% inspection. Small trial orders sometimes get fully inspected rather than sampled as a result, which is a genuinely useful property of a first order with a new supplier.

Booking the Inspection: the 80% Rule and the Window That Decides Everything

Inspections do not fail because the goods were bad. They fail because nobody could attend in time, and the container shipped uninspected against a vessel booking nobody wanted to lose.

Two published constraints govern the calendar. Accredited agencies require the order to be at least 80% finished and packed before they will perform a pre-shipment inspection — QIMA states this explicitly as a precondition. And mobilisation is fast: QIMA states its inspectors can be on site anywhere in the world within 48 hours, with the report delivered the same day the inspection is carried out.

Put those together and the planning rule is simple. The inspection window opens when production hits 80% and closes when the truck leaves for the port. On a typical PP-R order that window is a handful of days, and it is the supplier who knows when it opens.

Working backwards from the vessel cut-off

• Ask for the 80% date at order confirmation, not at the end. It is the only date that matters for booking, and suppliers do not volunteer it because they think in terms of the completion date.
• Book against that date, with two working days of slack. A 48-hour mobilisation capability is not the same as a 48-hour booking guarantee at month end, when every factory in the region is finishing orders at once.
• Leave time for a re-inspection. If the lot fails, the goods must be sorted or reworked and re-presented. An itinerary with zero slack turns a failed lot into a shipped lot, because the alternative is missing the vessel.
• Book too early and you inspect the wrong thing. Attending at 40% completion means the inspector samples from the first production run, which is often the best material of the order rather than a representative sample of it.

What it costs, and the honest answer about rates

The large agencies — SGS, Bureau Veritas and Intertek — do not publish standard man-day rates; their pricing is negotiated at account level, so any figure you read online is somebody's quoted experience rather than a tariff. Industry commentary commonly puts the major agencies at roughly USD 300–600 per man-day and regional specialists at roughly USD 180–350, but treat those as estimates and get your own quotation. What is not an estimate is the structural point: an inspection is priced by the day, one day covers one location, and the two grounded facts above — the 80% precondition and the same-day report — matter far more to whether the inspection is worth booking than the fee does.

The genuine cost decision is not the man-day rate. It is whether the balance payment is tied to the inspection result, because an inspection you have already paid the supplier in full for is an expensive way to receive bad news.

The Checks That Actually Stop a Bad Shipment

Most inspection checklists published online are material-agnostic and read like a list of nouns: quantity, workmanship, colour, packaging, shipping marks. They are not wrong, but they do not tell an inspector what "fail" means. For thermoplastic pipe, the highest-yield checks are dimensional, they take seconds each, and the pass/fail criteria are printed in ISO 15874-2.

Wall thickness: the tolerance only runs one way

This is the check that pays for the inspection. ISO 15874-2 Table 9 expresses the wall thickness tolerance in the form +x/0 — a positive allowance above the minimum wall, and nothing at all below it. A pipe measuring under its minimum wall thickness is non-conforming by any margin at all. There is no "within tolerance" argument available to the supplier, because the tolerance in that direction is zero.

That matters commercially because wall thickness is exactly where a squeezed margin goes. Shaving material off the wall is invisible in a photograph, invisible in a stack, and directly proportional to the resin saved on every metre extruded. It is also the property the pipe's entire pressure rating is calculated from.

Minimum wall emin (mm)	Permitted tolerance	What the inspector should reject
>1,0 to 2,0	+0,3 / 0	Anything below emin
>2,0 to 3,0	+0,4 / 0	Anything below emin
>3,0 to 4,0	+0,5 / 0	Anything below emin
>4,0 to 5,0	+0,6 / 0	Anything below emin

The tolerance level in that table corresponds to Grade V of ISO 11922-1. Note also clause 6.2.2: pipes intended to be joined by fusion must have a minimum wall thickness of 2,0 mm regardless of what the pressure calculation alone would permit — a thin-walled pipe that satisfies a pressure class on paper can still be non-conforming if it is meant to be socket-fused.

Outside diameter, against the actual table

Mean outside diameter has a stated range in ISO 15874-2 Table 5 for dimension class A, and it is tight. These are the values an inspector should be handed rather than asked to look up.

Nominal size DN/OD	Mean OD min–max (mm)	Minimum wall, series S5 (mm)
20	20 – 20,3	1,9
25	25 – 25,3	2,3
32	32 – 32,3	2,9
63	63 – 63,6	5,8
110	110 – 111	10,0

An inspector with a vernier caliper, this table and a sample of 200 pipes can find a systematic dimensional problem in under an hour. That is the whole argument for third-party inspection of plastic pipe in one sentence: the cheapest instrument in the kit checks the property that carries the pressure rating.

The visual check is a standards check, not an opinion

Clause 5.1 of ISO 15874-2 is more specific than most inspectors' default checklists. Viewed without magnification, internal and external surfaces must be smooth, clean and free from scoring, cavities and other surface defects to an extent that would prevent conformity; the material must not contain visible impurities; and pipe ends must be cut cleanly and square to the axis.

Slight variation in colour appearance is explicitly permitted, so colour shade alone is a weak rejection ground. Visible impurities are not a matter of taste, though — they are a clause. If you have ever argued with a supplier about black specks in green pipe, that sentence is the one to cite. For the wider question of how to tell genuinely virgin material from recycled content, our guide on identifying virgin PP-R against recycled pipe covers the field and lab indicators in detail.

The Same Checks on PVC and HDPE: Different Standard, Same Argument

Everything above reads ISO 15874-2 because PP-R is the most commonly inspected pressure pipe in this trade. Swap the material and the inspection does not change shape — it changes which document the inspector holds. PVC-U pressure pipe is governed by ISO 1452-2, and PE (HDPE) water pipe by ISO 4427-2. Both carry the same one-sided wall tolerance that makes the caliper check worth doing, and both have their own marking table.

The wall tolerance runs one way in all three materials

ISO 1452-2 clause 6.4 states that the nominal wall thickness corresponds to the minimum allowable wall thickness, and its Table 3 expresses the tolerance in the form +x/0 — the identical construction PP-R uses. ISO 4427-2 lists wall thickness as e_min and e_max columns, with the tolerance calculated as grade V of ISO 11922-1, (0,1e_min + 0,1) mm rounded up. In every case the floor is hard and the ceiling is generous, for the same reason: the pressure rating is calculated from the thinnest point.

Material	Standard	Wall tolerance form	Marking frequency
PP-R	ISO 15874-2	+x / 0 (grade V)	At least once per metre
PVC-U	ISO 1452-2	+x / 0 (grade W)	Not less than once per metre
HDPE (PE 80 / PE 100)	ISO 4427-2	emin to emax (grade V)	Not less than once per metre

What changes on a PVC container

The outside-diameter tolerance in ISO 1452-2 Table 1 is tighter than most buyers expect and is stated as +x/0 as well: 0,2 mm for DN20 through DN32, 0,3 mm at DN63, 0,4 mm at DN110. The check an inspector should add for PVC that PP-R does not need is out-of-roundness, which the same table limits separately — at DN110 the permitted ovality is 2,2 mm for the thin-wall series S20 to S16, tightening to 1,4 mm for the heavier-wall series S12,5 to S5.

That extra check matters more than it looks. PVC is more brittle than PP-R, and ovality is where poor stacking in a container shows up first, so a pipe that measured perfectly round at the factory can still fail on arrival. It is an argument for inspecting the packing, not just the pipe.

Colour is also a specification rather than a preference here. ISO 1452-2 clause 5.2 restricts water-supply pipe to grey, blue or cream, and pressure drainage to grey or brown, and requires the colour to be uniform throughout the wall. A cut end showing a different shade inside is a legitimate rejection, and it is the fastest visual indicator of an off-spec compound.

What changes on an HDPE container

HDPE is where marking carries the most weight, because the material grade is invisible. A PE 80 pipe and a PE 100 pipe of identical dimensions look the same and are not the same product — at SDR 11, PE 80 is PN 12,5 while PE 100 is PN 16. ISO 4427-2 Table 6 requires the pipe to carry the standard number, manufacturer, dimensions, SDR series above DN32, the material designation, the pressure rating in bar, and a production period code. Substitution of PE 80 for PE 100 is the single most valuable thing an inspector can catch on a PE order, and it is caught by reading the print, not by measuring.

Colour again carries meaning: ISO 4427-2 clause 5.2 permits blue, black, or black with blue stripes, and reserves blue pipe and blue-striped black pipe for drinking water. Black pipe delivered against a potable-water order is a specification failure a non-specialist inspector will walk straight past unless the purchase order says so.

One more portable point: the laboratory constraint from the previous section applies here too, with different numbers. ISO 4427-2 Table 3 sets hydrostatic strength at 20 °C over a 100-hour test period, and the 80 °C test at 165 hours. The oxidation induction time test requires at least 20 minutes at 200 °C. None of that fits inside an inspection visit either, and the same remedy applies — witnessed, sealed samples sent to a laboratory.

Reading the Print on the Pipe: Eight Items ISO 15874-2 Requires

Marking is the check buyers skip and inspectors rush, and it is the one that decides whether a shipment clears a port and whether a batch can be traced two years later when a joint fails on a jobsite.

ISO 15874-2 clause 10.1 requires marking to be printed or formed directly on the pipe not less than once per metre, and to survive storage, handling and installation legibly. Where printing is used, the colour of the printed information must differ from the base colour of the pipe — which is why green-on-green printing is a legitimate rejection and not a cosmetic complaint. Table 12 then sets out the minimum content.

Required aspect	Marking or symbol
Number of the International Standard	ISO 15874
Manufacturer's name and/or trade mark	Name or code
Nominal outside diameter and wall thickness	e.g. 16 × 2,2
Pipe dimension class	e.g. A
Material	e.g. PP-R
Application class with operating pressure	e.g. Class 1/10 bar
Opacity, if declared by the manufacturer	e.g. opaque
Manufacturer's information for traceability	Production period (year and month, figures or code), plus a name or code for the production site where the manufacturer produces at several sites

The last row is the one to insist on. Without a production period on the pipe, a batch cannot be isolated later. If a hundred joints start weeping in one building eighteen months from now, the difference between a targeted recall of one month's production and an argument about the entire shipment is a date code printed on the pipe. Note too that the standard mentions the possible need for CE marking where legislation requires it — a market question rather than a product one, and one worth confirming against your destination market rather than assuming. Our overview of PP-R certifications and what different markets enforce sets out which schemes actually get checked at which ports.

Where opacity is declared, the requirement is quantitative: an opaque polypropylene pipe must not transmit more than 0,2% of visible light, tested to ISO 7686. That is a laboratory measurement rather than an inspection-day one, but it is a declared property you can hold a supplier to on the technical file.

The Tests Your Inspector Cannot Run, and What to Ask For Instead

Inspection agency marketing routinely lists "field tests" and "functional testing" among the things a pre-shipment inspection covers. For thermoplastic pressure pipe, this creates a specific and expensive misunderstanding: buyers arrive believing they have commissioned a pressure test on their goods, and they have not, because it is arithmetically impossible.

ISO 15874-2 Table 10 sets the resistance-to-internal-pressure requirements for PP-R. There are four of them, and every one is a duration.

Hydrostatic (hoop) stress	Test temperature	Test period	Test pieces
16,0 MPa	20 °C	1 h	3
4,3 MPa	95 °C	22 h	3
3,8 MPa	95 °C	165 h	3
3,5 MPa	95 °C	1000 h	3

The shortest of these runs one hour. But the hour is not the obstacle. ISO 1167-1, the test method Table 10 points to, states in its conditioning clause that test pieces shall not be tested within the period after manufacture specified by the referring standard, and otherwise a minimum period of 24 hours after production must be observed. On top of that, the specimen must be filled, brought to temperature and conditioned for a period set by wall thickness: one hour below 3 mm, three hours from 3 to 8 mm, six hours from 8 to 16 mm, ten hours from 16 to 32 mm.

So for pipe that came off the line this week, the shortest legitimate pressure test in the standard needs 24 hours of ageing, then up to ten hours of conditioning, then an hour under pressure — before anyone reads a result. And Table 11's thermal stability test runs 8,760 hours at 110 °C, which is one year. A one-man-day inspection cannot contain any of it.

Ask for these instead

• Witnessed sampling with sealed specimens. The inspector selects the test pieces from your production, marks and seals them, and they go to the laboratory. This is the only way a later test result is provably about your goods rather than about a retained sample from a good batch.
• Type-test records for the material. The long-duration tests exist as periodic type testing, not per-shipment testing. Ask for the report, check the material designation and the dimensions match what you ordered, and check the date.
• Melt flow rate on the batch. This is the standards-based route to the recycled-content question. ISO 15874-2 requires the compound at no more than 0,5 g/10 min at 230 °C under 2,16 kg, and requires the finished pipe to differ from the compound of the same batch by no more than 30%. A pipe MFR far off its own compound is evidence of thermal history the material should not have.
• Longitudinal reversion. An oven test, not a pressure test — PP-R at 135 °C, with reversion not exceeding 2%. Exposure is one hour for walls up to 8 mm. It is short enough to be genuinely feasible at a factory with an oven, and it exposes over-oriented extrusion.
• Impact resistance where cold-climate handling matters. Charpy method, PP-R tested at 0 °C over ten test pieces, with a true impact rate not exceeding 10%.

The reasonable expectation to hold is this: an inspector verifies identity, dimensions, marking, quantity, packing and documentation, and witnesses sampling. A laboratory verifies material performance. Anyone selling you both in a single man-day is selling the second one loosely. The detail of how those laboratory results should be presented back to you is covered in our guide to what a per-shipment PP-R quality control report should show, which walks the report line by line.

Container Loading Supervision Is a Different Booking

A buyer whose inspection passed and whose container still arrived wrong has usually discovered the same thing: product inspection and loading supervision are two services, booked separately, often on different days.

The inspection bodies are clear about the split in their own published scopes. SGS describes loading and unloading supervision as verifying traceability of products — production codes, plant numbers and stock numbers checked against the packing list or invoice — together with verification of the external and internal condition of the container and inspection for cleanliness, including debris, insects and vermin. Intertek similarly monitors the loading, verifies product quantity and, once checks are complete, seals the container with its own seals and issues an inspection report. SGS likewise applies its own seals on request, specifically to reduce the risk of tampering, theft and substitution.

Read that last phrase again, because it names the failure mode. The risk loading supervision addresses is not that the goods were bad. It is that the goods that were inspected are not the goods that were loaded.

When the second man-day is worth it

Book loading supervision when	You can usually skip it when
First or second order with a new supplier	Long-running relationship with a clean record across many containers
Mixed-size loads where the count per size is the commercial risk	Single-SKU full loads where a miscount is self-evident on arrival
Destinations where a customs seal discrepancy creates clearance problems	Short sea routes with straightforward clearance and a local agent present
The inspection was days before the loading date	Inspection and loading happen the same day at the same site

One practical note on packing that inspectors do check and buyers rarely specify: pipe is loaded telescoped, small diameters nested inside large, and how that nesting is done determines whether ovality is introduced in transit. Our walkthrough of how PP-R pipe should be loaded into a container covers the loading patterns and quantities per container size. And if a container does arrive wrong despite everything, the deadlines you are working against are much shorter than most importers expect — the claim windows for a defective pipe shipment are worth reading before you need them, not after.

What to Put on the Purchase Order So the Inspection Has Teeth

An inspection is only as strong as the document it measures against. If the purchase order says "PPR pipe, PN20, green," the inspector has nothing to fail the goods on except the supplier's own specification — and a supplier's specification never disagrees with the supplier's production.

Everything below comes from the clause values established earlier in this article. Together they turn an inspection from an opinion into a contractual test.

• Name the standard, the dimension class and the series. Not "ISO 15874" alone but, for example, ISO 15874-2, dimension class A, series S5, PP-R. The class and series are what fix the dimension table the inspector reads.
• State the inspection level and the AQL per defect class. For example: ISO 2859-1, General Inspection Level II, AQL 0 critical / 2.5 major / 4.0 minor. Without this the agency applies its house default, which may not be yours.
• Classify wall thickness below e_min as a major defect explicitly. This is the single most valuable line in the document. It removes any argument about which AQL column the most important measurement falls under.
• Require marking per ISO 15874-2 Table 12 including the production period. Traceability is contractual or it is absent.
• Require batch certificates and type-test records at inspection. Ask for them to be available on the day, not emailed afterwards.
• Tie the balance payment to a passed inspection report. Your entire bargaining position is in the sequence: inspection before balance, or the inspection is a formality.
• Name who pays for re-inspection after a failed lot. Standard practice is the supplier, but only if it is written down.
• Require notification at 80% completion. This makes the booking window a supplier obligation rather than something you chase.

A worked example you can copy

Take a 40-foot container of mixed PP-R sizes, 8,400 pipes on the packing list. At order confirmation you write the eight clauses above into the PO. At 80% completion the supplier notifies you, and you book a product inspection for two days later, leaving four days before the vessel cut-off.

The agency applies General Inspection Level II to a lot of 8,400 — code letter L, a sample of 200 pipes. The inspector measures wall thickness and outside diameter against class A series S5, checks marking against Table 12, verifies count and packing against the packing list, and witnesses and seals specimens for laboratory testing. Nine major defects would pass the lot at AQL 2.5; eleven would fail it.

Suppose the report comes back with four major defects, all under-thickness on DN63, and the batch certificates present. That is a pass — but a pass with a pattern, and the pattern is the actionable part. Four under-thickness readings on one size out of a 200-pipe sample says something about one extrusion line, not about random variation. The right move is not to reject the container; it is to ask for the DN63 line's process records and to specify 100% inspection of DN63 on the next order. That is what an inspection is for: not a verdict, but a signal you can act on before the next container is made.

If you are still choosing who to buy from rather than how to inspect them, the sourcing side of this decision sits in our PP-R supplier overview, which sets out the size range, pressure classes and order structure a manufacturer should be able to confirm before you get this far.

What to Demand of Any Supplier Before You Book Anyone

The inspection agency is the last line of defence, not the first. Most of what an inspection eventually finds was predictable from how the supplier answered four questions months earlier.

• Will you accept third-party inspection at our request, in writing, before the deposit? The answer matters less than when you get it. A supplier who agrees after the deposit has agreed under different conditions than one who agreed before it.
• Do you issue batch certificates per shipment? Per shipment, not per year, and not a single type-test certificate reused indefinitely.
• Can you state size range, pressure class and MOQ without hedging? A manufacturer knows its own extrusion range immediately. Hesitation here usually means the answer depends on who they buy from.
• Will you send samples before the order? A sample you can measure yourself against the tables in this article is a cheap preview of the inspection result.
• What is the production lead time, and when in it does the 80% point fall? Lead time on PP-R is set per order against the size mix, the colour and whether tooling or private-label printing is involved, so no supplier can quote it as a single number honestly. What they can give you is a production schedule with the 80% date marked on it, and that is the date your inspection booking hangs on.

For reference, IFAN's own published position on each of the five buyer questions above: third-party inspection is accommodated at the buyer's request; material is 100% virgin PP-R with batch certificates issued per shipment; the range is DN20–DN160 in PN12.5 to PN25, built to DIN 8077/8078 and ISO 15874, with SASO, SONCAP and NOM certificates available on request for the markets that require them; the minimum order is one container with mixed sizes accepted; and samples are available before an order is placed. Those are the answers to compare against, whoever you end up buying from.

A supplier's resistance to an inspector is itself the most useful piece of information in this whole process, and it is free. It arrives months before the container does.

Where a Supplier's Own Checks Stop, and Where a Laboratory Starts

One boundary is worth stating plainly from the supplier side, because mistaking it is what produces an inspection clause nobody can fulfil. Two documents sit either side of it.

The resin batch certificate is a per-shipment document — at IFAN the material is 100% virgin PP-R 100 grade and the certificate is issued per shipment rather than reused from a file, so it is a reasonable thing for your inspector to ask to see on the day. The long-duration hydrostatic and thermal-stability results are not per-shipment documents at all: that work belongs to periodic type testing in an ISO lab, on its own schedule and its own sampling, and the record you are entitled to is the existing type-test report, not a fresh result dated to your container.

The practical consequence is a drafting one. No supplier can compress a 1,000-hour test into a shipment schedule, and one who offers to run your pressure test on inspection day is describing something other than the test you asked for. Write the clause to demand both documents by name — the batch certificate for this shipment, the type-test records for the product — and you will get them. Write it to demand a laboratory result the calendar cannot produce, and you will get an argument at the worst possible moment, with the vessel booked.

What to check on the report before you release the balance

The report arrives the same day. Before it becomes the basis for releasing money, run it against this list — every item is verifiable from the report itself in about ten minutes.

• Does the lot size on the report match your packing list? If the inspector recorded a smaller lot, a smaller sample was drawn and the inspection covered less than you paid for.
• Is the sample size the one the table gives for that lot? 8,400 pipes should show 200. A sample of 80 on that lot size is not Level II and should be queried.
• Are defects broken out by class, with the AQL stated for each? A total defect count with no critical/major/minor split cannot be checked against any acceptance number.
• Are the measured dimensions recorded as numbers, not ticks? "Wall thickness: OK" is not a measurement. You want the readings, because the pattern across sizes is the part worth having.
• Do the photographs show the marking legibly? Marking is the item most often ticked without being photographed, and it is the one you may need eighteen months later.
• Are witnessed samples identified by seal number? Without seal numbers on the report, a later laboratory result cannot be tied to this shipment.

Conclusion

The failure this article exists to prevent is not a bad container. It is a good inspection commissioned against a bad purchase order, arriving too late in the schedule to change anything, and reporting a pass on a sample nobody defined. Every one of those is decided before the inspector arrives.

Fix the sequence and the rest follows: name the standard and class on the PO, classify under-thickness as a major defect, set the inspection level and AQL yourself, require notification at 80% completion, tie the balance to the report, and understand that the laboratory work happens on a different clock than the visit. If you are specifying an order now and want the size range and pressure classes confirmed before you write the inspection clauses in, that is the right time to ask.

Frequently Asked Questions