Production readiness audit Establish the parameters before the data does.

Every production-data page on this site says the same thing: output is produced to a supplied specification, and where the parameters are not supplied, output that is safe to run cannot be produced.

That is an honest position and it creates an obvious problem. A shop that has just bought a machining centre, or has lost the person who set it up, frequently does not have those parameters.

The audit is how that gap gets closed, and it is why it sits ahead of the data work rather than alongside it. A supplier who skips it and produces cut lists anyway is guessing on your material.

• Stocked material. Sheet and board sizes actually held by material, not the sizes the catalogue lists.
• Cutting parameters. Kerf by tool, trim allowances, and how much the sheet edge can be trusted.
• Holding and clamping behaviour. What your table can hold, minimum part size, and where parts move.
• Edge banding process and its dimensional effect at the part.
• Grain and directional constraints by material, and where sequence matching applies.
• Part identification and labelling convention, so labels match the drawing rather than the software's default.
• Downstream file formats and conventions your system consumes.
• Where the process currently breaks. Usually the most useful section, and rarely the one a shop expects.

A written parameter record for your shop, in a form that can be handed to any supplier rather than only to us.

Alongside it, a findings note: what is established, what is uncertain, and what should be verified on a test cut before anything is committed to material.

The record is yours. It is not a lock-in document, and a shop that takes it elsewhere has still got what it paid for.

• No post-processor setup and no G-code. Those depend on the machine, its controller, its tooling library and its condition, and they stay with your programmer or your machine integrator. That is a permanent boundary rather than a capability being built toward.
• No machine servicing, calibration or mechanical assessment. The audit records behaviour; it does not diagnose a spindle.
• No production data. That is separate scope, quoted afterwards on the basis of what the audit establishes.

Because it produces something of value independent of anything that follows.

A written parameter record is useful whether or not you ever buy a cut list from us. If it were free it would be a sales visit, and a sales visit produces a proposal rather than a document.

Shops that have bought a machining centre and cannot yet feed it properly. Operations where the person who set the machine up has left and took the parameters with them. Manufacturers moving from drawings-only detailing into production data, who want the foundation established before the first cut list is quoted.