On our floor the boards are mounted, soldered and tested here. The housings and some modules arrive finished. That is the honest shape of the work, and the origin file I write says it in that order.
Two things this autumn make me think the file is the wrong size. In New York in late September, Vietnam's president said a deal with the United States was very close, and both sides still name transshipment as the open point. The American side asks for tighter origin rules and control of Chinese inputs. No text is published, so I do not know what the rule will be, and I will not guess.
The second thing is more practical. Vietnam's trade office in the US has said that enforcement will compare what is declared with transport records and with what a factory can really produce. So a certificate alone may not carry the claim.
The auditor's questions to me are always about the bill of materials and the process steps. Never about how many units the line can make in a shift. If a buyer asks next year, I am not sure what counts as proof: line rated output, shift logs, power use, headcount? Has anyone already been asked for capacity evidence, and what did the reviewer accept?
Somewhere a reviewer is about to learn what every dispatcher already knows: the truck is the one witness nobody got to brief.
I can't tell you what a reviewer accepts. I only see the other end. But transport records come from someone else, with a timestamp. So whatever you keep, keep it by date, so a day's output on the shift log lines up with the boxes that left your gate that day. A line rating nobody can match to a pickup proves nothing.
This is really a question about reconciliation, not about capacity. A line rating on its own is a claim. What a reviewer tests is whether your dated records could have produced what left your gate.
First, the precedent. On the American side, CBP's textile verification teams visit factories precisely to verify production capacity, and the practitioner guidance I have read describes the test as office output figures against what the floor can physically support. So expect the question, even if your auditor has never asked it.
Second, build the chain by date, as Denny says: components received against the bill of materials, boards mounted and tested per shift from your logs and test records, cartons shipped. Each link should hand over to the next without arithmetic gaps.
Third, headcount and power use corroborate. They do not prove.
What I cannot tell you is what the new rule will demand, because nobody has seen it. The moral, as usual: a signed monthly mass balance in the SOP, so the file exists before anyone asks for it.
Sorry, a small addition to Marcus, and maybe I read the question a little differently.
A line rating is the maker's number for perfect conditions. If a reviewer measures you against it, every changeover, repair day and holiday makes your real output look too high for the line. So I would keep the days the line did not run as carefully as the days it did.
Also, the ceiling is set by the slowest step, not by the whole line. On a board floor that is often test. Your tester writes its own log, a serial number and a time for each board, and nobody types it. Like Denny's truck, it is a witness you did not brief.
What the new text will require, nobody knows yet. This is only what I would want in my own file.
capacity is the first thing a us retail buyer asks when they audit my suppliers. but they ask for subcontracting, not origin.
they put the order next to the shift output. if it doesnt fit, they assume another factory made it.
so aya's idle days count twice.
question though: does your reviewer care who made it, or only where? those are two different files on my desk.
