Reviewing Supplier Specs Without Trusting My Memory

When reviewing supplier documentation, I’ve learned not to trust assumptions — especially around units.

This came up while checking a PDF full of mechanical specs. Everything looked fine at first glance, until I noticed some values were listed in millimeters while our internal docs expect centimeters.

It wasn’t enough to “know” the conversion. These numbers were going to be referenced later, and getting them wrong would quietly propagate errors.

Normally I’d script something, but this was a one-off review task. Writing code felt heavier than the problem itself.

So I treated the conversion as a temporary check step, quickly converting a few millimeter values into centimeters using a simple page like https://mmtocm.net
, just to verify everything lined up.

Once the numbers made sense, the rest of the review went back to being about structure and clarity — which is where my attention actually mattered.