Ask a quality manager how long it takes to review an incoming MTC and the typical answer is "it depends" or "a few days." Both answers signal the same underlying problem: there is no defined standard for what the process should take, so there's nothing to measure the actual performance against.
MTC review cycle time is one of the most tractable quality process metrics for fabrication shops. It's measurable, it's improvable without capital investment, and the gap between current state and best-in-class is almost entirely a process gap — not a staffing or technology gap.
What Best-in-Class Looks Like
A standard MTC review — one cert, one PO line item, one ASTM standard — should take a trained quality technician 8–12 minutes to complete. That includes opening the cert, identifying the heat number, comparing mechanical properties and chemistry against the job spec limits, confirming the test type and standard revision, and logging the approval decision.
Most fabrication shops take 30–90 minutes per cert when the actual review time is measured — not the calendar time, but the time the technician spends actively working on that cert. The difference is process friction: finding the PO spec, locating the applicable ASTM limits, manually comparing values across two documents, and determining where to record the approval decision.
Calendar time — from cert receipt to cert approved — is typically 48–72 hours because review queues are processed in batches rather than on receipt. The actual review takes 45 minutes; the queue adds two days.
The Four Process Gaps That Inflate Review Time
Spec not attached to the PO. This is the most common gap. When the cert arrives for heat 44821 on PO 7823, the reviewer needs to know what the spec requires for that line item. If the PO only references "A572-50" without attaching the actual ASTM standard and the project-specific supplementary requirements, the reviewer has to find that information separately. That means navigating to the ASTM portal, locating the correct revision, identifying the relevant table, and extracting the limit values — before the comparison even starts. This step alone can take 15–25 minutes on a spec the reviewer doesn't know by memory.
No comparison template. With the cert open in one window and the ASTM standard open in another, the reviewer manually reads both documents side-by-side and makes a judgment about whether each value passes. There's no structured checklist, no pre-populated limit fields, no automatic flagging of out-of-spec values. The comparison is as reliable as the reviewer's attention on that particular morning. For certs with 15–20 measured properties, the cognitive load is significant.
No decision trail. After reviewing, the technician files the cert and moves on. There is no record of which properties were checked, what the ASTM limits were, who performed the review, or what the decision was. If an auditor asks six months later whether heat 44821 was properly reviewed, the only answer available is "we have a copy of the cert in the folder." Whether it was validated against spec is not documented.
Multi-cert jobs with no batching support. A job with 20 heats requires 20 individual cert reviews. Each one is a separate lookup, a separate comparison, a separate filing task. There's no mechanism to batch the reviews — to review all 20 against the same job spec simultaneously, or to flag the one heat out of 20 that has a problem while automatically clearing the other 19.
What "Days" Usually Means in Practice
The typical MTC review workflow at a fabrication shop follows this path: cert arrives in the quality inbox → sits until the next scheduled review cycle (1–2 business days) → reviewer works through the queue in the order received → approval decision sent by email to the buyer → cert filed in the job folder.
The actual review might take 45 minutes. The queue adds 48 hours. The total calendar time from cert receipt to approved is 2–3 days — which is the number that affects the production schedule if any issues are found and need resolution.
If the cert has a discrepancy — a value outside spec, a wrong revision, a missing supplementary test — add another 2–3 days for supplier communication and resolution. By the time the cert is cleared, the material may already be on the shop floor under a hold tag, waiting for documentation to catch up.
The Fix: Structured Incoming Queue With SLA
The process change that collapses review time from days to minutes is straightforward: attach the spec to the PO at PO creation (not at cert receipt); route certs to a structured review queue with a defined SLA (same-business-day for standard certs); use a comparison checklist pre-populated with ASTM limits for the specified grade; and record the approval decision digitally with timestamp and reviewer identity.
None of these steps require sophisticated technology. A structured PDF form for the review checklist, a shared queue visible to the team, and a naming convention that links the approval record to the cert file accomplishes most of the gain.
The review time drops from 30–90 minutes to 8–12 minutes because the lookup work is eliminated. The queue time drops from 48 hours to same-day because the SLA is defined and tracked. The audit trail exists because the checklist is the record.
What to Read Next
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