Factory Quality Assessment is a powerful way to evaluate your potential supplier's reliability and capabilities. Without proper management, buyers could face various risks including financial burden, brand damage and legal disputes arising from failure of suppliers’ performance in social compliance, environmental, technical and security.

A social audit is a formal review of a company's endeavors, procedures, and code of conduct regarding social responsibility and the company's impact on society.

Environmental management audit – verifies whether the company has met the environmental objectives, policies, and performance set by management. A significant number of manufactures today do more than environmental management audits. They stay one step ahead of compliance and try to proactively improve their environmental performance to improve project and business performance, as well as secure their reputation.

C-TPAT is a United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP) initiative that stands for Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism. C-TPAT is a voluntary program where participants work to protect supply chains from the concealment of terrorist weapons including weapons of mass destruction. This partnership is for organizations involved in the global supply chain including United States importers, customs brokers, terminal operators, carriers and foreign manufacturers.

As a crucial part of the new supplier vetting process, a factory audit helps you to evaluate a potential supplier’s reliability, capabilities and warns you of any key risks that might prevent them from meeting your needs. You can then be on the basis of the audit report to help make the decision on whether to work with them or not. If you remain ready to further purchase, rectification solutions from the factory audit would be a big help. There are a number of different types of factory audits that you may consider, though, so which is right for you?

The Textile Exchange has developed a series of certification standards related to the Chain of Custody in order to ensure the reliability of Content claims and integrate them with the requirements of sustainability. Including but not limited to: RCS, GRS, OCS, GOTS, RWS/RMS/RAS, RDS and other series of standards.

Conducting a supplier assessment before and during your cooperation with a supplier in China, India, Vietnam, or elsewhere in Asia, will not only help to make sure that they are the right partner, but also that they are capable of maintaining the standards that you require over time.