Hi Joe, Thanks for your response. We appreciate your opinion. A few points I'd like to comment on. I don't think that simply looking for ISO certification qualifies a PCB shop as a "good" PCB shop. In fact I've been in some pretty poorly run ISO certified shops. And, no disrespect for our hosts here, IPC membership certainly doesn't make a shop competent. Any shop can become a member. Of course any end user that would want to audit a PCB shop with more than one facility would need to take that into account. But as a PCB manufacturer don't you audit the facilities where your cores and pre-preg are made? If so, don't you go to that specific location or do you allow a multi-unit material supplier to ship to you from any facility. Maybe you don't audit your material supplier, I don't know. But clearly, using one shop's "grade" to measure the quality from the sister company doesn't make sense. And the last thing I'd like to comment on is toward your last item, what third party would be qualified to audit your shop. Well, certainly end users who have never manufactured PCB's are not fully qualified. But a group of PCB process engineers, quality engineers and manufacturing professionals would probably be. People who have spent a minimum of 15 years (each) in the business of manufacturing PCB's. Maybe even people who have, at one time or another, worked at your shop. Again, we appreciate your feedback. We're just beginning the "thinking" portion of this venture and may not even proceed with it. Just seeing if the end user community would benefit from it. Thanks. Mark Mazzoli ############################################################## TechNet Mail List provided as a free service by IPC using LISTSERV 1.8c ############################################################## To subscribe/unsubscribe, send a message to [log in to unmask] with following text in the body: To subscribe: SUBSCRIBE TECHNET <your full name> To unsubscribe: SIGNOFF TECHNET ############################################################## Please visit IPC web site (http://www.ipc.org/html/forum.htm) for additional information. If you need assistance - contact Gayatri Sardeshpande at [log in to unmask] or 847-509-9700 ext.5365 ##############################################################