Answer

How do you track non-conformities digitally in a factory?

One register, on the line. Capture the non-conformance at the station with a photo, or let a failed hold point on the line check raise it for you; classify it; issue it to one owner with a due date and let rules chase it; close it only on a photo of the correction, verified by someone who did not do the work; then export the trail for the auditor. IssuesId does all of that on one record, offline, with no seats for operators.

ANSWERED FROM THE PRODUCT DOCS·UPDATED SEPTEMBER 2026
Before the tool

What “digitally” has to mean on a factory floor

Most plants already track non-conformances digitally in the weak sense: a form in a document system, a spreadsheet the quality office keeps, photos on somebody’s phone. That is three places, and the surveillance audit is the fortnight spent reconciling them. Digital only helps when it collapses the three into one record that passes six tests.

01
Captured where it happens
At the station, by the operator who saw it, with a photo, in the thirty seconds before the line moves on. Not written on a tag and typed up at shift end.
02
One register, not a form and a spreadsheet
The inspection that found it, the record, the corrective action and the close-out are the same object, so nothing is retyped and nothing drifts.
03
A named owner and a due date
Every open non-conformance belongs to one person, with a date, and something chases it when the date passes.
04
Evidence to move it
It cannot be marked corrected without a photo of the correction, and the person who did the work cannot be the one who accepts it.
05
A trail you can hand to the auditor
Who raised it, who was told, what they did, who verified it, and when, printed under the entry, exported as a file the auditor can open.
06
Works with no signal
Plant rooms, coolrooms and the far end of a steel-clad shed are dead zones. The record has to save on the phone and sync later.
How it runs in IssuesId

Six steps, one record

  1. 1Draw the plant as a location tree
    Line, station, bay or jig, as rows in the project’s location tree, so a non-conformance is filed against a place a person can walk to and a filter for Line 2 returns Line 2. Print a QR label for each station and stick it on the guard; scanning it opens that station’s list. (The tree was drawn for buildings, level and room, and a factory bends it. It works; it is not yet named for you.)
  2. 2Put the checks on the line as an inspection
    Build the station check once as a reusable yes/no checklist and run it per shift, batch or unit. Mark the checks that must not be waved through as hold points; the job waits on them. Every No raises a tracked record on its own, with the photo, so the inspection and the non-conformance are never two documents.
  3. 3Let the floor raise the ones the checklist missed
    Anyone on the floor can raise one with a photo and a dictated note, offline, in under a minute. Classify it from your own list (weld porosity, out of tolerance, missing guard, wrong label) and say what kind of record it is, so a customer-return does not get counted with the process faults.
  4. 4Route it to one owner, with a date
    Issue it to a named person with a due date. Workflow rules do the chasing: notify the owner on assignment, escalate to the quality manager when it goes overdue, tell the shift lead when it is disputed. If the owner thinks it is someone else’s, they dispute it on the record, not in a corridor.
  5. 5Close it on evidence, verified by someone else
    The owner marks it corrected only with a photo of the correction. It then goes to ready to inspect, not to closed, and a role that did not do the work looks at the before and after photos and signs it off, by name, at a time. Sign-off is a status only the right roles can set; it is not a signature pad.
  6. 6Export the trail for the surveillance audit
    Every step above is on the record and prints under the entry. Reports group by location, by owner, by type and by month; the Defects Export gives the auditor every record as a spreadsheet; the PDFs carry the photos and the trail. Your ISO 9001 surveillance becomes a file you send, not a fortnight you lose.
One non-conformance from a failed hold point to a verified close, as the record keeps it. The auditor reads the trail, not a summary of it.
The formal one

What about an NCR with management review?

Some non-conformances need more than a fix. A quality plan or an ISO 9001 system will say that certain types or severities go through a formal Non-Conformance Record: drafted, submitted, reviewed by management, approved or rejected, corrective action certified, then closed, with trades and operators kept out of it entirely. IssuesId models that as a separate register with its own seven-state lifecycle and tighter role gates, and it is documented in full at NCRs.

Where it stands today, plainly: the NCR lifecycle is implemented and enforced on the API, but there are no NCR screens in the app yet. Teams running a formal process do it on the register described above, using Type and Classification to separate the ones that need review, and the register’s own disputes, evidence rules and reports. Ask us before you plan a rollout around the formal NCR screens; we would rather say that here than have you find out in week three.

Related questions

Asked alongside this one

How do you track non-conformities digitally in a factory?
On one register that lives on the line. A non-conformance is captured at the station with a photo, or raised automatically when a hold point on the line check fails; it is classified from your own list, issued to one owner with a due date, chased by workflow rules when it goes overdue, marked corrected only with a photo of the correction, verified and closed by someone who did not do the work, and exported with its full trail for the ISO 9001 surveillance audit. The register works offline in the parts of the plant with no signal and costs nothing per operator.
Is a non-conformance the same as a defect?
On the floor, mostly yes: something is not to specification, it needs an owner, a fix, evidence and a sign-off, and IssuesId tracks it as one record with a type and a classification so a customer return is not counted with a process fault. The formal Non-Conformance Record with management review, approval and certification is a separate, slower register in the quality plan; IssuesId models it with its own seven-state lifecycle, and today that lifecycle is enforced on the API without app screens, so formal NCRs are run on the main register with Type and Classification marking them out.
Do line operators need a licence to raise one?
No. IssuesId is priced per active site rather than per seat, so every operator, fitter and shift lead can have it on their phone. External maintenance contractors do not need an account at all: they get an email with a link to their own items, open it on any phone, and upload a photo of the correction, and they cannot close their own work whichever way they get in.
Read on

Where this answer comes from

The manufacturing page, quality inspection software for manufacturing, shows the line check, the hold point and the non-conformance flow with the screens. The docs behind this answer are NCRs, inspections and hold points, workflow rules, reports and offline and PWA. For the honest version of what carries over from construction to a factory floor and what is still construction-shaped, we wrote issue tracking for warehouses and factories. Two neighbouring questions have their own pages: how do you track overdue inspection items across a large site? and how does a subcontractor answer their part of an inspection checklist?