What is pre-shipment inspection?

A Pre-Shipment Inspection (PSI) mainly means a quality inspection process performed at a supplier’s or a factory’s premises by either your QC department or an independent third party quality control inspection agency.

It’s a very common QC check for the consumer product industry in particular. It helps buyers, importers, traders, wholesalers, and retailers safeguard the quality of goods up to a certain quality level before the finished products are shipped. Such QC inspection can help avoid any nasty surprises. Through preshipment inspection, you can also know your goods are in proceeding order long before the delivery — quite useful if your suppliers are too far away.

You might have heard this type of inspection check called a final random inspection (FRI) or outgoing inspection (OQC). In reality, they are all the same thing; quality inspections carried out once the products are 100% finished and at least 80% packed into the cartons.

The Advantages of Pre-Shipment Inspections

There are lots of benefits to a PSI inspection, like you can find the problems earlier, fix any quality problems on-site, avoid quality arguments, make sure the quality of your goods are ok before final payment etc.

For example: the pre-shipment QC inspection procedure will save you a fair bit of time and money. Once the goods are in the country of destination, correcting faults becomes costly and requires additional shipping and time delays. By identifying any defects and errors in the batch before shipping, it makes things easier for suppliers to rectify any issue there and then.

Pre-Shipment Inspection Standards

Whether you use your own QC staff or a 3rd-party inspection company, commonly there is an international standard for sampling procedures and acceptance criteria that most QC inspectors will adopt.

ACCEPTABLE QUALITY LIMIT (AQL)

This AQL Table ANSI/ASQ Z1.4-2003 (Equivalent to ISO 2859-1 or MIL-STD-105E) is widely used for consumer goods Pre-Shipment Inspections throughout the world. It is a model that uses statistical number crunching to define the highest acceptable number of defects in the batch (i.e. how many defects can be allowed), beyond the number, it should be rejected.

The AQL chart is mostly the same for all industries, so it always provides a statistically balanced, unbiased guideline. You can further tailor it to your needs based on your own quality expectations.

RANDOM SAMPLING PLANS

Because the time and cost. In final quality inspection, the QC Inspectors can’t and won’t check every product. Instead, they’ll use sampling plans to determine how many samples they need to pick randomly to get a statistical overview of the quality level of the whole shipment.

The general inspection level II is the most common, and a default one. The general inspection level III is the most extensive check and samples a larger portion of the shipment compared to a general inspection Level I inspect at the lower end of the scale. Choosing your own AQL general inspection level will also depend on the quality risk you are facing and the type of products to be checked. For general consumer goods, General inspection level II is recommended, while automotive or medical products should be inspected at the general inspection level III.

DEFECT CLASSIFICATION

Depending on the needs of the buyer, preshipment inspection sampling can be used to verify different defects of the quality. One of the most commonly used within the consumer goods industry is to classify the visual workmanship defects as follows: critical, major or minor and define an acceptance quality limit (accordingly to AQL chart) for each one of them.