Garment quality control and AQL

Quality control at every operation

Two customers rarely accept the same thing. One will take a variance the other rejects outright, and the inspector on the line is usually the person deciding which. The point of what follows is to move that decision away from the line and into the specification, and to find problems while they can still be fixed.

See pricing

$450 Factory M · $900 Factory L · $1,800 Factory XL — prices on the page.

Thirty days of inspection: pieces inspected, pass rate, first-pass yield and defects, by production unit

Last 30 days

Pieces inspected929
First-pass yield80.9%
Defects found177

The Quality App on a tablet: the size chart, the inspection timer and the flat to pin defects on

01 · Inline quality

Checked at the operation, not only at the end

Quality audits run during production, at the operation. Each inspection records the defect rate and a result — accepted, accepted with deviation, rejected or held — against the standard the order was set to. A problem found at the third operation is a problem that hasn't yet been sewn into two thousand pieces.

A quality level: each check in order with its seconds, whether a fault is fixed or rejected, and the running total

02 · IQ Level

One operation, two customers, two standards

IQ Level — forgive the pun — stands for INDOPAR Quality: an in-house methodology for a calibrated quality standard. It sets what's acceptable for a given customer or order, and the inspections carried out on the line are measured against it. The same operation can be checked to a different standard for two customers without anyone having to remember which.

The Final QC App on a phone: open production orders, each with the quantity planned and its check level

03 · Before it ships

Final control, with hold and release

Control on what's about to leave, against the same standard the order was set to, with hold and release so a batch doesn't ship while it's still in question.

The defect heatmap: where defects land on the jean, front and back, hottest at the pockets and seams

04 · Root cause

Finding the cause, not just the count

Defects are marked directly on the fashion flat the designer drew, which builds a heatmap of where faults cluster — a seam, an operation, a line. Hotspots read by operation, unit, season, category and severity. A non-conformance report carries the five-why, containment, and the corrective and preventive actions, and stays open until someone closes it.

05 · Cost

The cost shows up in the rejection rate

The argument for inline inspection is a cost argument. Rework and scrap are reported per batch and per operation, defects are counted where they happen, and supplier quality ratings are built out of the incoming inspections you were already doing. A defect caught at the third operation costs a fraction of one caught at final audit.

35 → 22 defects per hundred

First-round inline inspection at INDOPAR, since moving off paper. Final control now runs 2 to 4 per hundred — the leak that's left after inline catches the rest.

Connected to the rest

Quality can't be separated from the line it happens on. The inspections come off the same batch cards production scans, the measurements come from the tech pack design drew, and the rework and scrap land in costing as what the defect actually cost.