A mill test report, commonly abbreviated as MTR, is a quality assurance document that records the chemical composition, mechanical properties, material grade, heat number, and applicable specifications for a metal product. It allows manufacturers, fabricators, distributors, inspectors, and customers to trace material to its production batch and evaluate whether it meets purchase and industry requirements.
MTRs can go by many other names, such as:
- Certified Mill Test Report
- Mill Certification
- Metallurgical Test Report
- Mill Test Certificate (MTC)
- Inspection Certificate
- Mill Inspection Certificate
- Certified Material Test Report
- Certificate of Test
Basically, MTRs show proof of a metal product’s origins, traceability and provide certainty to the end user about the metal quality and processes involved to create it.
Mill test reports typically include information such as:
- The country that the product was melted and produced in
- Physical and chemical property specifications
- Exact size, diameter or shape dimensions
- Compliance with standards organizations like ANSI, ASME or ASTM
Material test report processing is performed by trained professionals and is a very time-consuming but necessary process. But luckily, there’s a far better way that can provide significant cost and time savings for fabricators and material customers.
Table of Contents
What’s Included in a Mill Test Report?
Every steel mill is different, so their reports will also appear slightly different. However, they all contain basically the same information to help a customer verify the material’s dimensions, properties, and much more.
Here is an example test report, along with descriptions about the data that is universal to almost every mill test certificate:
1) Customer Details
Usually located near the top of the report is information about the manufacturer and customer. This includes the name of the customer, purchase order number, and dates of transaction.
2) Product Description
Next to the customer details section, you will find information on the quantity of materials, dimensions like width and thickness, and much more.
This section also documents which governing specification standards (ASTM, AMS, ANSI, etc.) apply to this material.
3) Material Heat Number / Heat Code
The heat number is a code for that specific metal product. It can be used to identify that exact product and help consumers, manufacturers or mills learn about it’s origin.
This number can be traced back to the mill or origin, the specific metal forging session that the batch of metal was created in, and the chemicals in the product. This number is also stamped on the metal before it is shipped out from the mill of origin.
4) Chemical Analysis
The chemical analysis data describes the metal alloys included in the metal. Depending on the alloys included in the product, the metal is required to fall within specific ranges to comply with specification standards.
Common alloys included in this section are amounts of copper, nickel, aluminum, chromium and carbon.
5) Mechanical Properties
This data describes the metal product’s mechanical properties, like strength, hardness, elasticity and ductility. This information is vitally important how the product will be used. The customer can use this information to learn or ensure that the metal will stand up it’s intended application.
6) Quality Assurance Statement
This section affirms the manufacturer’s compliance with associations such as certified Quality Management System practices.
Heat Treatment
This information will only be included on a mill test report if a temperature treatment was applied to the metal product. These treatments change the physical or chemical properties of metal material.
Treatments can include applying extreme heat or cold to material like normalizing, tempering, or hardening.
Material Grade
The mill test document will also detail the grade of the metal that was produced.
How to Read a Mill Test Report in 7 Steps
Confirm the supplying mill and document identity
Verify the mill name, report number, issue date, customer, and purchase order.- Match the product description to the material received
Compare the product type, dimensions, quantity, grade, and finish against the order and physical material. - Verify the heat number
Match the heat number shown on the report to the identifier stamped or marked on the material. The heat number is the critical connection between the certificate and the production batch. The current page already explains this traceability function. - Check the governing specification and grade
Identify the applicable ASTM, ASME, AMS, ANSI, or other specification and confirm that the correct revision and grade are listed. - Review the chemical composition
Compare the reported values for relevant elements with the allowable ranges in the governing specification. - Review the mechanical test results
Check yield strength, tensile strength, elongation, hardness, impact results, and other required tests where applicable. - Confirm certification and acceptance
Verify the certificate type, required declarations, signatures, third party inspection information, and any purchaser specific requirements.
Why is it So Tough to Process Mill Test Reports?
There are many reasons for this, including:
- The huge amount of data contained on the mill test certificates
- The mill test report document layout is different for each manufacturer
- Poor image quality because they’ve been printed, hand-signed, and scanned
- They can contain several different languages since international distribution of these commodities is so common
Here’s a sample MTR for a steel plate from the Paul Mueller Company, a stainless steel manufacturer:
As you can see, there are a lot of fields of data, like:
- Data and general product info
- Product description
- Remarks
- Physical properties
- Chemical analysis
- Mechanical properties
The crucial thing to note is that once a raw product is shipped to a manufacturer, it is then their responsibility to track and maintain an awareness of the information on the test report.
For example, in the steel industry this is done through a heat code, or heat number stamped or written on the metal itself.
Common MTR Problems
When there are errors with MTRs, they can create downstream work problems. These errors include:
- Heat numbers that do not match the material
- Missing pages
- Illegible scans
- Incorrect grade or specification
- Units that are misunderstood
- Values copied into the wrong field
- Certificate type that does not meet the purchase requirement
- Duplicate or altered documents
- Reports that cannot be connected to the received material
These problems can be noticed if a human manually reviews them. But automated processing solutions catch these problems much faster and more consistently.
Why is Automated Processing of Mill Test Reports Important?
MTRs are important documents for metal suppliers and their customers as they verify a metal product’s properties and origins. These documents certify that the products have met certain regulatory standards.
ASME certification require that mill test reports must be kept on file for up to three years after a product has been used to create something. It’s obvious that this critical data be kept in a database for tracking and reporting.
This is why automating the processing of mill test data is a huge time-saver for companies who use and process a large number of raw products from many different vendors.
To make the point about why automation has been so difficult, perform a Google search for mill test report examples and you’ll see that there’s no standardization for how the reports are structured.
How to Use AI to Process Mill Test Reports in 5 Steps:
Some MTRs are emailed in PDF format as part of the shipment notification for ordered products. However, in many cases only physical copies are available, so they must obviously be scanned.
Step 1: Mill Test Report Document Image Processing
The first step is taking the digital copy (scan) of the test report and using document processing software to remove all non-text elements.
This means digitally removing all the lines and non-text objects. Humans need this kind of document structure to gain an understanding of the data. But for software to “read” the MTR, these lines and objects only get in the way.
And if the MTR has been faxed and dragged around a dirty shop floor, and then scanned – it’s going to need some digital cleanup!
Step 2: Read Your Data
Next, optical character recognition (OCR) and AI are used on the material test report to recognize all text on the page. Modern OCR tools are advanced enough to use different methods on the document until all text is accurately recognized.
Even if 100% accuracy isn’t obtained, this will be corrected in later steps.
Step 3: Training on Your Test Reports
The third step is to use machine learning to train software to recognize that a document is the mill test report. This is important in case additional documents are attached to the MTR. You may or may not want to collect this additional data.
This training may sound daunting, but it’s pretty simple. Training is as simple as putting a test batch of MTRs into the system and telling AI which pages are the material test report.
Training will require a few examples, but not hundreds or thousands. Once the system learns what an MTR is, you can test it on a much larger set of documents to verify it is correctly classifying the documents.
Step 4: Human Review of Mill Test Report Data
This step is one of the most important: reviewing any exceptions or discrepancies in your reports.
Remember I mentioned earlier that there may be some characters not read with 100% accuracy by the OCR engines? Here’s where the system is programmed to flag any word or number it isn’t 100% sure about.
In a data review screen, the test report will be displayed in a visual format so that what the system “read” can be compared with the actual document.
A critical part of human review is to set up the system to automatically search through known information, like: Purchase Order Number, Material Grade, and Order Requirements.
By “looking up” this information in your database and comparing it to what was found by the automated processing software, you add an additional layer of quality assurance. So, if your purchase order was for a particular material grade but the MTR lists something different, this will also be flagged for human review.
Step 5: Integrating Your Material Test Report Data
The final step of the process is to integrate the material test report data and the digital copy of the document(s) with your existing quality software or reporting tool.
It’s only made possible by a new intelligent document processing platform called Grooper.
Interested in learning how to automate review processes for mill test reports? Contact us to learn about automating your MTR processing!
Frequently Asked Questions
What is an MTR?
An MTR is another way to refer to a Mill Test Report. MTRs are certificates that verify that the chemical make up of raw materials such as steel and metal alloys were properly analyzed.
These reports are created by the raw material’s manufacturer and MTRs follow the metal along the supply chain until it’s final destination. MTRs help inform the end user that the metal can stand up to necessary requirements for every day use.
What is MTR processing?
MTR processing is the process of capturing, validating, and managing information from Mill Test Reports (MTRs)—documents that certify the chemical composition, mechanical properties, and quality of metal materials. Automated MTR processing uses software and AI to extract key data such as heat numbers, material grades, test results, dimensions, and compliance information from MTRs and convert it into structured data for quality, manufacturing, inventory, and compliance systems. This reduces manual data entry, improves accuracy, and accelerates material traceability workflows.
What is the Best Software for Mill Test Report Processing?
The best software for mill test report (MTR) processing depends on the complexity of your documents, the volume you process, and how much manual effort your team wants to eliminate. For organizations dealing with large numbers of MTRs from multiple mills, suppliers, and formats, the ideal solution should automatically classify reports, extract key material data, validate results, and integrate with downstream systems. It should also be flexible enough to handle the wide variety of layouts commonly found in material certifications.
One solution that stands out is Grooper, an AI-powered document processing platform designed specifically for challenging document environments. Unlike traditional software that relies heavily on fixed templates, Grooper uses AI-driven document classification and data extraction to process documents with varying formats and layouts. This makes it particularly well suited for mill test reports, where each supplier may present information differently.
With Grooper, organizations can automatically extract information such as:
- Heat numbers
- Material grades
- Chemical composition data
- Mechanical test results
- Purchase order numbers
- Dimensions and specifications
- Manufacturer information
- Certificate and compliance data
Beyond extraction, Grooper can validate information across documents, maintain traceability, and export structured data to ERP, quality management, document management, or manufacturing systems. The platform also supports scanned PDFs, digital files, and other document sources, making it suitable for both current and historical MTR archives.
For companies that process only a handful of highly standardized reports each month, simpler tools may be sufficient. However, for manufacturers, metal service centers, fabricators, distributors, aerospace organizations, energy companies, and quality departments that process high volumes of MTRs from multiple suppliers, Grooper is one of the most capable options available because it combines AI classification, AI data extraction, validation, search, and workflow automation in a single platform.
How accurate is automated mill test report data extraction?
Automated MTR data extraction can be highly accurate, but results depend on scan quality, report complexity, layout variation, handwriting, and system configuration. AI-powered software improves reliability by extracting fields such as heat numbers, material grades, chemical composition, and mechanical properties, then applying validation rules and routing uncertain results for human review. Accuracy should be measured on your organization’s actual MTRs rather than assumed from a general benchmark.
Can software match mill test reports to purchase orders and material records?
Yes. MTR processing software can match reports with purchase orders, receiving records, inventory items, and material records by comparing identifiers such as PO numbers, heat numbers, lot numbers, material grades, and supplier names. When an exact match cannot be confirmed, the software can flag the record for review. This automates material-document association, strengthens traceability, and reduces manual quality-control work.
