CEQMAS provides consultancy to Companies setting up a Factory Production Control (FPC).

The purpose of factory production control is defined in the Construction Products Directive as "the permanent internal control of production exercised by the manufacturer".

Factory production control therefore brings together operational techniques and all measures allowing maintenance and control of the conformity of the product with technical specifications. Its implementation may be achieved by controls and tests on measuring equipment, raw materials and constituents, processes, machines and manufacturing equipment and finished products, including material properties in products, and by making use of the results thus obtained.

The manufacturer is responsible for organising the effective implementation of the factory production control system. Tasks and responsibilities in the production control organisation should be documented and this documentation should be kept up-to-date.

Production control operations include some or all of the following operations:

• the specification and verification of raw materials and constituents;
• the controls and tests to be carried out during manufacture according to a frequency laid down;
• the verifications and tests to be carried out on finished products according to a frequency which may be laid down in the technical specifications and adapted to the product and its conditions of manufacture.

This monitoring of conformity focuses where necessary on the product throughout the process of manufacture, so that only products having passed the scheduled intermediate controls and tests are dispatched.

Tests should be in accordance with the test plan and be carried out in accordance with the methods indicated in the technical specification. These methods should generally be direct methods. It is however possible, in the case of certain characteristics, that the prescribed specification gives the possibility of using indirect test methods if a definite correlation or relationship can be established between a specified characteristic and another characteristic  which is easier or safer to measure.

If control or test results show that the product does not meet the requirements, for example if the statistical variation of test results exceeds the limits allowed by the technical specification, the necessary corrective action must immediately be taken. If products have been delivered before the results are available, a procedure and record should be maintained for notifying customers.

All the Manufacturers having an FPC system which complies with EN ISO 9000 and which addresses the requirements of the appropriate harmonised standard are recognised as satisfying the FPC requirements of the Directive.