Ninety-six office desks were built to the drawing and every one of them was correct. The office doors on that floor were 15 mm narrower than the tabletop, and nobody had measured a door.

The order, and the line nobody wrote

A European office fit-out: 96 fixed-height work desks and 96 pedestals, ordered as one package against a furniture drawing and a purchase order that ran to two pages. The desks were specified as 1400 by 900 mm with a 25 mm veneered top at 740 mm finished height, on a welded steel leg frame with the legs set 60 mm in from the edges of the top. Delivery was to be assembled and installed by the supplier's own fitters, because the programme ran for six weeks and the floors were being handed over one at a time.

The purchase order specified the desk. It did not specify the building. Nowhere in it, in the furniture drawings, or in the site instructions was there a line about how the desks were going to get from the loading bay to the office they were for. The architectural drawing showed the corridor and showed the doors. The two sets of documents were issued by two different parties and read by two different people, and neither party read the other's.

The desks were made correctly. That is not in dispute, and it is the reason this case is worth writing. There was no defect in the goods, no fault at the factory, and no charge to anyone. What there was instead was a 15 mm gap between a drawing and a doorway, and nobody had been paid to look at it.

What the goods actually were

The pre-shipment inspection on the 96 desks was routine and uneventful. The checks that were asked for were the ones the order asked for: size against the drawing, top thickness, height, legroom, frame finish, and the veneer match against the approved sample. Nothing in the order said to check whether a desk would fit through a door, because there was no door information in the order to check it against.

The measurements on the report are the measurements on the drawing, and they were right. A report like that is a good report. It is also, on this occasion, a report about the wrong subject.

The door, and how a door has to be measured

The first desk was assembled on the landing outside the office, because the room was still being fitted out and the fitters wanted somewhere out of the traffic to open the cartons and check the assembly before moving it in. It stopped at the door. The foreman measured the leaf, then measured the opening, then called the supplier.

The office doors on that floor are 900 mm leaves. Measured the way a door has to be measured for furniture, with the leaf swung fully open to 90 degrees and the clear width taken from the face of the leaf to the door stop, the clear opening was 885 mm. The architectural drawing for that floor showed 1000 mm doors. The doors that were installed were 900 mm leaves, and the difference between a drawing and a building had already cost one desk and most of an afternoon.

The top of the desk is 900 mm deep. 900 against 885 is 15 mm.

Why 15 mm was never going to be found on the factory floor

Fifteen millimetres on a 900 mm top is 1.7 per cent. It is smaller than the dimensional tolerance most buyers write into a furniture order, and far smaller than the scatter that 96 tables show in veneer colour and edge finish. A dimensional inspection compares the goods against the drawing. The drawing and the goods were the same. There was nothing to compare them against.

An office desk inspection cannot find this, because an office desk inspection compares the goods against the order, and the order was not the problem. The order was perfectly clear about the desk. It was silent about the building.

There is a second number on the same drawing that people look at all the time, and it is worth being precise about which number decides what. The drawing also says the legs are set in 60 mm from the edge of the top. That 60 mm is the number everyone quotes, because it is the one that describes the desk: it is why the frame is only 780 mm deep, why there is 1180 mm of clear legroom between the frames, why the desk looked right in every photograph ever taken of it. It decided nothing about the door.

The frame, 780 mm deep, would have gone through that opening with 105 mm to spare. The top, 900 mm deep, did not. The dimension that stopped the desk was never on anybody's screen, because it was not a dimension of the desk at all. It was a dimension of the building.

The number the furniture standard does not give you

EN 527-1 covers the desk. It fixes the work surface height for a fixed-height desk at 740 plus or minus 20 mm, sets a minimum legroom width, limits how thick a top may be at the front edge and 500 mm further back, sets a minimum foot clearance under the worktop, and requires the top to be at least 800 mm deep, with a stated limited-situation allowance down to 600 mm for small flat screens on freestanding single-user desks, and requires that limitation to be given to the user with the product.

What it does not do is specify the length of the desk. The standard's own note is explicit: no dimension is given for the width or length of a work table or desk, because the size depends on the task and the user, so a 1400 mm desk is exactly as conforming as a 1600 mm one. Every length in the range is compliant, and compliance therefore tells the buyer nothing about whether the desk will get into the room.

That is not a defect in the standard. A standard for desks has no business knowing about a particular corridor. It does mean that the length, the depth and the delivery route are all buyer-side information, and if the standard cannot supply it and the factory cannot supply it, it has to come from somewhere else. The only somewhere else is the purchase order.

How the report was written

Findings are graded Critical, Major or Minor. There was nothing to grade. The goods matched the order, the order was the buyer's own document, and the factory had built to it. Recording a defect here would have been wrong, and so would recording a pass, because a pass would have sent 96 desks to a floor they could not reach.

So the report was written in four places. Section 02, reference documents, carried the note that the purchase order specified no delivery route information and that no architectural drawing or door schedule had been provided for the check. Section 05 recorded the measured dimensions against the drawing with the actual numbers, so the buyer could see for himself that the goods were correct and the door was not. Section 06 carried the passage attempt, the two tape readings, the leaf at 90 degrees, and a photograph of the desk standing in the opening. Section 07 carried the recommendation, which was to assemble the desks inside the rooms rather than on the landing.

Section 08, the part of a report we are least comfortable writing, carried the one line that made the whole thing make sense. The desk was verified against the order. The order was verified against itself. Nobody verified the desk against the building, because the building was not in any of the documents we were given.

The recommendation that cost nothing

The desk separates into two parts without damage. The top is fixed to the frame with eight screws driven from underneath into metal inserts, and the frame is a welded assembly. The frame is 780 mm deep and goes through the 885 mm opening with 105 mm to spare. The top is 1400 by 900 by 25 mm and goes through carried on its long edge, which presents 25 mm across the opening and needs 1400 mm of headroom; the door is 2040 mm high.

Laying the top flat again needs floor. Turning a 1400 by 900 mm panel from its edge down to the floor takes roughly that footprint plus the space two people need to work in it, so call it 1900 by 1400 mm. The room measured 2900 by 3400 mm, so it was fine. That measurement came from the same architect's drawing that had shown the wrong doors, which is worth saying out loud: the only document anyone held that said anything about the building was the document that was wrong.

So the recommendation was to assemble the desks inside the rooms instead of on the landing. No rework on the goods, no charge to the factory, two days of the installer's programme moved, and the room handed over on the original date. The alternative, buying a shallower desk, was not free either. EN 527-1 asks for at least 800 mm of top depth, and the limited-situation allowance below that applies only to small screens on freestanding single-user desks and has to be given to the user with the product. Narrowing the top to 870 mm to win 15 mm would have traded a delivery problem for a piece of product information the buyer then had to carry for the life of the desk.

For completeness: taking the door leaf off its hinges recovered 10 mm and still left the top 5 mm too wide. The leaf itself was the constraint, not the hardware.

The specification should have said

The order was not wrong about the desk. It was silent about the building. Six clauses close that gap, and every one of them is a single line.

• Route data: the buyer states the narrowest clear opening on the route from the loading bay to the final room, measured with every leaf at 90 degrees, together with corridor widths, lift car dimensions and lift door widths, and states the number as a requirement rather than as background information.
• Handling clearance: any dimension that has to pass through an opening on the route must be at least 30 mm smaller than the narrowest clear opening on that route, to allow for hands, hardware and turning.
• Component passage declaration: for each product the supplier states the largest shipped component, the minimum clear opening that component needs in its intended orientation, and whether the product separates into parts, with the separation method named.
• Delivery state and assembly location: the order states whether the goods arrive assembled or flat-packed, whether the supplier may assemble outside the room, and that if assembly happens on a landing or corridor, the assembled product's passage requirement applies from that point on.
• First article route trial: one desk is assembled and walked the full route before the balance of the batch is built, or the supplier supplies a dimensioned passage drawing showing the product in the narrowest opening on the route.
• Drawing reconciliation: the purchase order and the architectural door schedule are checked against each other before production, and where they disagree the narrower of the two governs.

Twenty minutes, before the goods are made

A route survey does not need a surveyor's licence. It needs a tape measure and somebody who is allowed to open the doors on the route. Six steps, and the whole case could have been closed before anyone paid for a desk.

• Measure the narrowest clear opening with every leaf on the route at 90 degrees, from the face of the leaf to the stop, and record which way each leaf swings. A leaf swinging into a corridor takes corridor width away from you, and a leaf swinging into the room takes room width away from you.
• Measure the corridor at its narrowest point and again at every turn, and note whether the turns are right angles. A right-angle turn is where a long product stops behaving like a long product and starts behaving like a shape that has to fit.
• Measure the goods lift door clear width and the internal dimensions of the car, and measure the stair widths if the route uses stairs.
• Take the smallest of all of those numbers and subtract 30 mm for handling. That is the largest dimension any component of the order is allowed to have.
• If the goods are delivered assembled, run the same test against the assembled product rather than against its parts, and remember that the assembled product is the largest thing anyone will have to move.
• Check the room, not only the route. A top that goes through a door on its edge still has to be turned flat somewhere afterwards, and that needs floor: plan for the panel length plus about 500 mm each way for the people doing the turning.

What it cost, and what it would have cost

The order was 96 desks and 96 pedestals, USD 26,976 of furniture. The problem cost one afternoon of the installer's time, a second visit for the site supervisor, and a floor handed over two days later than planned. Nobody was invoiced for anything, because there was nothing to invoice for. The factory had built what was ordered, and the buyer had not told it what else to build.