Twice a week someone asks us for "the SMETA certificate". There is no such document. What the audit produces is a report, and most of the PDFs forwarded to us are not one.
Last week a buyer in Munich sent a four-page file and asked whether we could issue the same. Page one had a company name and a red border. Page two said the company had been a Sedex member since 2021 and the subscription ran to March 2027. Pages three and four were the address and a signature.
Sedex is a platform. Factories pay to sit on it and upload documents. SMETA is the method an auditor follows during the visit. What comes out is a report plus a corrective action plan. Nobody certifies anybody, so there is nothing to frame.
The two documents look alike at a glance. A report names the audit company, the site's legal name, the site address, and the dates of the visit. The membership letter names whoever paid. If your attachment has no site address and no visit dates, it is not a report, whatever the border looks like.
For a plant our size the audit takes two days.
Day one is paper. Payroll, clock-in records, social insurance, contracts, fire drill logs, permits, and age documents for everyone hired in the last two years. The auditor lays three numbers side by side, hours worked, hours paid, units produced, and looks for the one that does not belong.
Day two is the floor. Interview names come from the worker roster, not from a list the factory prepares. People are spoken to one at a time with the door closed and no supervisor in the room. What were you paid, when, how many hours last month, did you sign a contract, where is the nearest exit.
Then the walk. Dust extraction on the polishing line, plating tanks, acid storage, first aid boxes, canteen, dormitories if there are any, and the exits. It is nearly always the exits.
Our last report carries a finding about cartons stacked in front of the second-floor fire door. They had been there three days, since a shipment came in. A second finding: a packer whose contract was renewed eleven days after the previous one expired. Both were closed within a week. Neither is dramatic, and that is what an ordinary report looks like.
Every audit we have had carried a working-hours finding. It is not a secret and it is not a scandal. It is a scheduling problem that gets worse in the four weeks before Chinese New Year, when the law sets a monthly ceiling and the order book does not read the law.
What matters is the sentence under the finding. "We will monitor the situation" is not a corrective action. Ours reads: four more polishers before October, second shift moved ninety minutes earlier, Saturday capped at eight hours, review in the first week of each month. Three of those are done. The fourth is still open and the log says so.
A report with nothing on it, from a plant this size, deserves a second read. Paper can be arranged before a visit. Interviews are harder to arrange, which is why the sample size on page four says more than the summary on page one.
| Where | What you want to see | What it means when you don't |
|---|---|---|
| Page one | Legal name and site address, matching your invoice | A different company, or a city office address for a factory |
| Audit dates | An on-site visit within the last twelve months | No visit dates, or a claim that the report is good for two years |
| Interviews | Sample size and how the sample was drawn | No numbers, or a section that reads like the HR department wrote it |
| Findings | A clause, an owner and a date for each item | Everything closed in one day, no action plan attached |
| Auditor | Audit company name and APSCA registration | Nobody named anywhere in the file |
SMETA looks at people and buildings. It does not look at the product.
For goods sold in the EU the product side is separate paperwork: REACH for restricted substances, EN 1811 for nickel release on anything that touches skin, and under GPSR a responsible person in the EU plus technical documentation. A social report does not stand in for a test report, and a test report does not stand in for the social one. German buyers usually ask for both in the same email. A supplier who answers both in one sentence has answered neither.
Four answers the same day is a good sign. "All documents available upon request" usually means the request takes two weeks and arrives incomplete.
2-pillar, renewed every year. We have not run 4-pillar. If your compliance team needs it, that is a separate booking with the audit company, about half a day longer on site, and we pass the fee through at cost. The current report and the open items log go out to any buyer who asks, unedited, findings page included. Two items are open at the moment, both with dates on them.
No. BSCI belongs to amfori and runs on its own question set and grading. SMETA is the audit method used on the Sedex platform. Some Chinese factories hold both, because different retail customers ask for different systems.
Nothing expires on the document itself. Most European buyers want an audit from the last twelve months. The next question they ask is whether the corrective actions from that audit were closed.
No. Labour standards, health and safety, and in the 4-pillar version environment and business ethics. Product compliance is REACH, EN 1811 and GPSR documentation, kept as a separate file.
Yes, and most do. Findings are graded non-compliances answered by an action plan with owners and dates. What gets checked at the next audit is whether the plan was carried out.
Ask us for the PDF and read the findings page first. If a supplier's document has no findings page, you have been sent something else.
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