Resources Sourcing guide
What a screening report tells you before the first call
A first call with a factory costs an hour on both sides. A screening report is how you know the hour is worth it: who they are, whether they fit, and the two questions still open.
The first call with a new factory is where most sourcing time goes to die. Forty minutes of introductions, a slide deck, a tour of the website you have already read, and then, in the last ten minutes, the question that should have come first: can you make this, at this volume, with this certificate, by this date? Half the time the honest answer is no, and everybody has lost an hour they were polite about.
A screening report exists to move that question to before the call. It is a short, structured answer to "is this worth an hour of two people's time", assembled before anyone picks up the phone. I use the term for anything that does that job: a two-page supplier questionnaire your team fills in, a checklist from a sourcing agent, or the report Zora writes from a screening conversation. The structure matters more than who fills it.
Turn an unknown into a decision
A screening report is not due diligence. Due diligence is what you do to a factory you have decided to work with. Screening is the go or no-go on spending real time at all, and it answers three questions in order: is this a real company of the right kind, can it do this job at this size, and on roughly what terms would it do it. One page. Five minutes to read. Anything longer and it stops being read before calls, which was the whole point.
The other thing a good report does is say what it does not know. A report that fills every field with confident text is guessing somewhere, and the guess is usually in the field that matters. "Not enough data yet" next to the certificate scope is more useful than a tidy answer nobody checked.
Real, and the right kind of real
First row, and the one people skip because it feels rude. A registered entity with a number you can look up (the KvK number in the Netherlands, the equivalent register elsewhere), a VAT number, and an address that is a production site rather than a mailbox. Then the question that decides how the rest of the report reads: factory or trader? Both can be fine. A trader adds a margin and a layer between you and the line, and you should know that before you negotiate with someone who has to phone the real factory for every answer.
Who you are actually talking to belongs here too. A sales engineer can answer a tolerance question on the call. A sales agent has to check and come back. Neither is wrong; only one of them makes the first call useful. The red flags are boring and reliable: a registry name that does not match the website, certificates issued to a different company, a "factory" that only exists as a rendering.
Can they, and can they at your size
Capability is the processes and materials they run, in their words rather than yours. If you wrote "plastic housing" and they wrote "injection moulding, 40 to 650 tonne presses, toolroom in-house", the report should carry their version, because that is the one you can check against a machine list. Capacity is your volume as a share of theirs, and both extremes are warnings: a job that is 90% of a factory's capacity makes you their whole risk, and a job that is 0.1% of it will be scheduled last every single month.
MOQ against your order, and certifications by number and scope rather than by logo. A certificate covers a site and a scope, and the row is not complete until both are written down. If you want the reasoning behind those numbers, the triangle piece and the certificate piece linked at the end go through them properly.
The terms you should already know
You do not need a price before the first call. You do need the shape of one: lead time for the first run and for a repeat, the payment terms they usually work on, the Incoterm they quote at, their sample policy, and whether a price ladder exists or you will have to ask for it. None of that requires a negotiation. It is what a factory tells any serious buyer, and if it was not forthcoming, that is itself a row in the report.
Then the reading. For every row, mark what was stated by the factory, what was inferred by whoever wrote the report, and what is still unknown. The inferred rows are where the first call earns its keep. The unknown rows are its agenda.
Reading one, and being read
Illustrative example. The factory in Fig. 01 is invented and unnamed, and its figures are made up to show how a report reads. It is not a customer or a real supplier.
Here is how I would read the report above. Identity: fine, a real factory with a sales engineer on the line. Capability: fine, and in their words. Capacity: comfortable, 8% of a line is a good place to be. Certificate: the number is there, but the scope is "the site" and the food-contact declaration is "on request", so that is the first question for the call. Price: no ladder yet, so the call has a second job. That is a call worth having, and it now takes twenty minutes with two items on it, instead of forty minutes of introductions and a question squeezed in at the end.
The part buyers forget is that screening runs the other way too. When you approach a factory through its own screening link or a chat widget on its website, the factory gets a report on you: who you are, what you need, your volume, your timing, and how well that fits its capacity, certificates and minimum. The buyers who get a yes quickly are the ones whose answers are complete and consistent. A vague volume, a missing date and no target price produce a report that says "not enough data yet", which a busy factory reads as "not yet serious".
The whole point
Spend the call on the two things the report could not settle, not on the forty it could.
On ZoraMatch the screening runs in both directions, and it runs before anyone is on a call. For a buyer, every name on the shortlist carries a written reason it is there, after hard filters on sector, certifications, country, capacity and MOQ have already removed the factories that could not do the job. For a factory, every lead that arrives through its widget or screening link comes as a structured report: who the buyer is, what they need, the volumes and timing, a fit score with the reasoning shown, and a PDF to share internally. When the data is not there, the report says "not enough data yet" rather than guessing. Accepting a lead opens the shared deal room, which is where the two open questions get settled.
For the rows that need the most reading, see MOQ, lead time and unit price and which certificate matters for your product.