On receipt of material, who should do QA/Confirmation of Specification Compliance. Procurement Professional, Intended User, Others (please specify)?

Upon receipt of ordered material, Quality control inspector and discipline engineer shall confirm specification and client representative may also witness that.

Thanks for invitation. 

For small value simple procurement, inspection could be done by procurement professional before delivery to the users. 

For large value  procurement, it should be qualified Engineers/Professionals of the third party who are generally called inspection agencies like SGS, Bureau Veritas, Intertek and so on. The inspection agencies have wide range of professionals in their payroll and can do the inspection very thoroughly and advise the client (purchaser) in writing regarding compliance or deviation from the specification.

Tnx for the invit.

That really depends on materials / goods procured. For consultancy services, it will be final user, for marketing agency services, it will be budget owner in marketing, for materials delivered to warehouse it can be warehouse employee + procurement + budget owner for 1st shipment, wh staff for subsequent shipments, for construction works it will perhaps be overseeing engineer + any appointed govt body. As I said, depends, there is no single answer, thou we, procurement professionals, sometimes get sidetracked by our own experience with our own categories.

Before answering this question, i want to draw the attention to the difference between the QA & QC. QA is stand for Quality Assurance which is mainly focusing on the factory or manufacturer compliance to the manufacturing process of the product, but the Quality Control (QC) is focusing on the level of the product quality, if the final product was produced based on the approved quality standard or not.

Let us go back to the question, i think the Warehouse personnel ( if it stock items) is responsible for checking the quality of the received materials, the warehouse team must include Quality staff to conduct this job.

In case the materials is non-stock items, the end user shall be responsible for the quality inspection when receiving the material in the product line.

The procurement guys have nothing to do with either receiving or checking the materials at all.    

In EPC projects, received materials of high value is immediately inspected at site with site manager arranging site inspection as per quality control procedures - " request for inspection " to be inspected by end user client representative at site. Any shortage thereof is communicated immediately to the project manager to claim it from the supplier with a copy of all supporting documents including packing list/ delivery note, inspection report, site photos on opening the packing boxes showing shortage

It depends if it is regular small value product then material quality part can be taken care by storekeeper, in case of higher value product where technical evaluation required then internal quality team should check and approve the same before store keeper accept the consignment.

In some companies, material received are two types; Non-Stock (direct Purchase) or Stock Material.

For first type, normally the owner of the material (user) should be the QA/acceptance.

For Stock Material, they have two ways for Specification Compliance Check.

1.    The user department or the Factory Quality Laboratory for operation material.

2.    In professional organization, they have a Material Engineer working in Inventory Control section where he has the experience and expertise to check material specification compliance and acceptance particularly for Maint.items.

Therefore, even if you have Procurement Professionals-like Engineers in Construction Companies- they should not take the responsibility of such role and all purchased material should be directed to the receiving Section in W/H.

For non complicated items and small value order, purchasing professionals can do the QA/Confirmation of Specifications, but for for high value orders like equipment's, instruments, etc this should be done by the certified engineers in the company/ or quality department together with the purchasing professionals.

Thanks for the invitation.

In some companies people are employed in quality assurance department ,in some companies the intenders who know about the materials themselves certfiying the materials in the shop.

The inspection process which match received material with specifications is quality department responsibility , quality have the specification and match material with it

Before receive materials there is materials approval process which done by procurement & production engineering & quality