HospitalityRoom keys, staff credentials and the pieces around them.
Retail and loyaltyGift, loyalty and membership cards with variable data.
Access controlCards and fobs matched to the reader you installed.
Clubs and associationsOne chip for the turnstile, the locker and the desk.
Events and festivalsWristbands, badges and lanyards for each edition.Why the second order is the risky one, the eight things a specification record has to freeze, and the three variables that drift by themselves.
The first order gets everybody's attention. Samples are approved, artwork is checked, somebody tests a card on a door. The second order gets a purchase order that says same as last time.
That is why the second order is the one that goes wrong. Same as last time is not a specification, it is a hope that nothing moved, and in manufacturing several things move by themselves.
None of this is exotic. It is the ordinary behaviour of a supply chain: component suppliers substitute equivalent parts, ink lots vary, sheet comes from a different mill run, an operator sets a press slightly differently. On a first order all of that is absorbed by the approval process. On a reorder there is often no approval process left, only a purchase order and an assumption.
This guide is for whoever owns the reorder: a programme owner running cards on a cycle, an operator restocking several sites, or an integrator topping up an estate.
Three things are true of a reorder and not of a first order. Nobody is watching it as closely. There is a previous batch in circulation to be compared against. And the people who made the original decisions may not be the people handling it.
The consequence is specific: a difference that would have been caught in five minutes on the first order reaches a client on the second, and it reaches them next to the original for comparison.
The second point is the one people underestimate. A first order has no reference to fail against; whatever arrives becomes the standard. A reorder is judged against something a client already has in their hand, which means a variation that would have passed without comment the first time becomes a complaint the second time. The tolerance has not changed. What has changed is that there is now something to compare to.
Same artwork does not mean same product
The artwork file is the part everybody keeps. The chip part number, the lamination recipe and the ink set are the parts that decide whether the card behaves the same, and they are the parts nobody thinks to save.
Eight lines. If they are written down, a reorder is a repeat. If they are not, it is a new product with a familiar picture on it.
Two of the eight deserve a note. The chip part number and its source because a substitution that is technically compatible can still behave differently, and the lamination recipe because it is the difference between a card that lasts three years and one that peels in month four. Both are covered in more depth in the guide to thickness and lamination and the guide to choosing the chip.
Line eight looks like housekeeping and is not. Carton counts and labelling are what a warehouse works from, and a batch that arrives in different quantities per carton, or with the label in a different place, quietly breaks whatever counting process the client built around the first delivery. It is the cheapest of the eight to record and among the most visible when it changes.
A component supplier offers an equivalent part, the factory accepts it, and a card that answers the same reader now behaves slightly differently at the edge of read range or under a weaker field. This is the drift with the worst consequences, because it produces intermittent faults rather than obvious ones, exactly like a configuration mismatch after a lock upgrade.
Intermittent is the operative word. A card that never works gets replaced on the spot and costs one card. A card that works nine times in ten generates a service call, a guest complaint, a maintenance visit and an argument about whose fault it is, and it does that for months before anybody connects it to a batch.
A new ink lot, a different operator, a substrate from another supplier. Each moves the colour a little. Nobody notices on the run, and everybody notices when the new card sits next to an old one.
Brand colours are where this hurts most. A corporate blue that is a shade off reads as a cheap reprint to the brand owners, whatever the technical tolerance says, and no amount of explaining the press will fix the impression.
Core sheets from a different batch laminate slightly differently. The cards look and feel identical, and six months later a proportion of them start lifting at a corner. This is the drift with the longest delay between cause and symptom, which is why lot numbers on the packing list are worth asking for even though you will almost never look at them.
The single most effective control costs nothing: keep a physical card from the approved run, and compare every future run against it.
Keep two retained cards: one at the factory and one with the buyer. Date them, mark them with the order reference, and store them out of sunlight, because a reference card that has faded on a windowsill is worse than no reference at all.
A retained card is not the same object as a pre-order sample, and the two are not interchangeable. A sample proves that a construction can be produced before the first run; a retained card proves what the approved run actually looked like afterwards. Card sample types and what each one proves sets out which sample answers which question, and the card delivery inspection checklist covers the check the retained card is used in.
A screen is not a substitute. A PDF proof on a monitor tells you the layout is right and nothing about the colour, the finish, the thickness or the feel of the laminate. Every one of the three drifts above is invisible on a screen and obvious with two cards side by side in daylight.
A change is acceptable when it is proposed and unacceptable when it is discovered. That is the whole of change control on a reorder. Chips go end of life, materials are reformulated and regulations move, all of which is normal; finding out from the carton is not.
A workable rule is simple to state and easy to agree: nothing on the eight line record changes without written notice and a new sample. It costs a manufacturer nothing to agree to, and a supplier who will not is telling the buyer how the last surprise happened. Where the construction itself is formally approved rather than just ordered, the card supplier qualification record is where that change clause belongs in writing.
It is worth adding one clause to that rule: when something does change, the notice names the old value and the new one. A notice that says the chip has been updated is not useful. A notice that says the chip moves from one specific part number to another specific part number, with a sample attached, is something you can hand to whoever runs the access system and get an answer from.
Five checks on arrival catch every drift described above. A reorder does not need the full first order protocol, but it does need more than a glance in the box.
Five minutes of work, and it catches all three drifts before a single card is issued. The first and last carton point matters because a production run is not uniform end to end: if something moved during the run, the two ends are where it shows. Where a programme needs the checks written down as a plan with sample sizes and accept criteria rather than as a habit, the plastic card quality control plan sets that out.
Kaway keeps and reuses the specification record for a run, which is what makes a reorder a repeat rather than a rebuild. The record covers the chip part number, the encoding parameters, the material and core, the colour references, the lamination recipe, the die, the finish and the packing.
Kaway manufactures in-house in Dongguan, China, and encoding is done at the plant, so printing, lamination and encoding sit in one record rather than across three. Where a card is printed in one place, laminated in another and encoded in a third, the record has to survive three handovers, and it usually does not. Every chip is read-tested individually before shipping, 100 per cent and not sampling, which is the first-and-last-carton check in section 06 done at source.
Minimum order is 500 units. Standard production is 12 calendar days for PVC and wooden cards. Quote requests are answered the same working day, which is what makes a reorder on a frozen record quotable without a new round of questions. Comparing card quotations on the same specification covers how a reorder price is held against the original, and the rest of the commercial detail sits on the FAQ.
Yes. For a programme reordering on a cycle this is the main practical benefit of staying with one manufacturer, and it is the reason a reorder can be quoted on the frozen record rather than specified again from scratch.
The buyer is told before the order runs, with the proposed replacement named and a sample offered. A substitution that arrives as a surprise in the carton is the failure this whole article is about.
Close enough that a client does not notice, when there is a retained sample to match to. Without one, the honest answer is that it depends on how long ago the last run was.
Larger batches reduce the number of times drift can happen and increase your exposure if something is wrong. The better answer is usually the same batch size with a proper record, and where the price actually stops falling covers the quantity side of that question.
Yes, and the buyer should keep one too. Two references in two places is what stops a disagreement becoming an argument.
For as long as the programme runs, and then one cycle longer. A card retained from four years ago is exactly what you need when a client asks why this year's looks different, and it costs nothing to keep.
Then the eight line record is the thing that makes it possible. A new supplier who is handed the chip part number, the material, the colour references and a physical sample can match a batch. One who is handed only an artwork file is guessing, and the result is a visible break in the programme.
Not usually, when nothing on the record has changed and a retained sample exists to compare against. It does when anything on the eight lines moves, and that is the whole point of writing them down.
No. The retained sample is the reference the inspection compares against, not the inspection itself. One card proves what was approved; the five checks in section 06, run across the first and last carton, are what show whether the delivered quantity matches it.
About this guide
Published by Kaway Group. The date on this page shows when this guide was last updated. If anything here is out of date, or contradicts what your integrator tells you, tell us and we will correct it.
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