The drawings are only the part of the process that someone bothered to record. The gap analysis is the search for everything else.
When a product moves, the documentation moves with it and the knowledge usually does not. The gap analysis is a structured hunt for the difference: what is documented, what exists only as habit on the old floor, and what has to be recreated from scratch before a single unit is built.
We run it as a list with an owner and an action per line, not as a report. Typical entries are dull and expensive: a fixture with no drawing, a test limit that lives in a spreadsheet, a connector whose approved alternate was never released, a packing method that protects a fragile edge nobody documented. Each one is small. Together they are the reason transfers slip.
Some gaps are closed by asking. Others need measurement — reverse-engineering a fixture, re-establishing a test limit from production data, or running a short capability study to find out what the process actually does rather than what the specification hopes it does.
The output is not just a closed list. It is a documentation set that is better than the one you started with, which is the quiet benefit of a transfer: the product finally has a definition that a third party could build from, and that definition belongs to you, not to a supplier's memory.
— GANI Contract Manufacturing engineering team