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We have been sending these Guidances to thousands of aerospace/defense organizations for nearly a year and have gotten many thankful responses.  We have had the opportunity to help a lot of companies.  We get contacted nearly everyday from companies struggling to understand and meet the requirements of the upgraded standards asking us what can we do to help them.  I thought I would take this opportunity to tell you what we recommend.

Eagle Force is a full-service consulting/training firm and we can do it all for you, but that is rarely necessary. What most organizations need is to have some guidance and coaching to ensure that they are on the right track. If you do this right you can take advantage of the changes being driven by these standards to really improve the way your organization operates.

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Our online Risk Management course is now available! See the entire post for more information and a link to the course page.

One of the major additions to the aerospace standards is 7.1.2 that requires Risk Management must be established, implemented and maintained for managing risk to the achievement of applicable product requirements, including:

• Assignment of responsibilities for risk management
• Definition of risk criteria (likelihood, consequences, risk acceptance)
• Identification, assessment and communication of risks throughout the product realization
• Identification, implementation and management of actions to mitigate risks that exceed the defined acceptance criteria
• Acceptance of risks remaining after implementation of mitigating actions

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One of the major additions to the aerospace standards is 7.1.2 that requires Risk Management must be established, implemented and maintained for managing risk to the achievement of applicable product requirements, including:

• Assignment of responsibilities for risk management
• Definition of risk criteria (likelihood, consequences, risk acceptance)
• Identification, assessment and communication of risks throughout the product realization
• Identification, implementation and management of actions to mitigate risks that exceed the defined acceptance criteria
• Acceptance of risks remaining after implementation of mitigating actions

Initial feedback is showing that organizations are struggling to effectively meet this requirement and especially trying to do it in a way that actually makes business sense.

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We are working with aerospace companies around the country helping them prepare for the upgrade audits that are coming. The topics most companies are concerned with are Risk Management, Project Management, and the expanded Configuration Management requirements. While these are legitimate concerns and we are about to launch an e-learning course on Risk Management, the primary issue seems to have escaped the notice of most organizations: process management.

The heart of the new audits is the process approach: identifying your processes, their sequence & interaction, defining the criteria for effectiveness, measuring & analyzing the results, and taking corrective or continual improvement actions. The amazing thing to me is that there just isn’t anything better an organization can do to improve its competitive advantage and yet it is completely missed in the upgrade activities.

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We discussed how in a newly created QMS the audit emphasis is primarily on documentation, but how that should rapidly evolve to implementation. Little emphasis is expended on effectiveness since that system is just being implemented. Unfortunately, most internal audits never evolve beyond auditing for implementation and actually the certification audits never did either.

But in a mature management system, which all of you should have if you are currently certified and moving toward the aerospace upgrades, you already know that your system is adequately documented and adequately implemented. Your internal audit focus needs to be on effectiveness.

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We have received requests for clarification on the internal audit graphs showing emphasis in an evolving system. So I will take these one at a time and discuss them. In this third graph (shown below) audit emphasis or focus is the y axis and the x axis shows how this emphasis changes over time.

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We have received requests for clarification on the internal audit graphs showing emphasis in an evolving system. So I will take these one at a time and discuss them. In this second graph (shown below) audit emphasis or focus is the y axis and the x axis shows how this emphasis changes over time.

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As we have been discussing in previous Guidances, particularly #26-28, the audit methodology for AS9100, AS9110 and AS9120 is undergoing radical changes. The aerospace industry is intent on ensuring that auditors are actually performing process-based audits. One of the primary tools that’s been developed to ensure that the audits are process-based and not clause-based is the Process Effectiveness Assessment Report or PEAR. If you missed any of these, you can find them on our website.

We have received requests for clarification on the internal audit graphs showing emphasis in an evolving system. So I will take these one at a time and discuss them. In the first graph (shown below) audit emphasis or focus is the y axis and the x axis shows how this emphasis changes over time.

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We have been watching the upgrade process closely and it appears to us like things are going to get wild in the near future. There never was an over-abundance of certified aerospace auditors, even before the necessity to re-qualify for the upgraded standards. There are many thousands of ISO 9000 auditors in America but there are roughly 450 certified aerospace experienced auditors listed in OASIS for the US & Canada and a number of those, like myself, are not actively auditing on a daily basis. When you combine this with what registrars are telling us and that is that auditors are failing to pass the qualification exams at a rate of 20% to 80%, you have a real problem brewing. Many of the older, most experienced auditors are just quitting.

I took a quick look at OASIS, the database that lists all the certified companies and all the certified auditors. As I write this, there are 7,317 certified aerospace sites in the Americas of which 180 have successfully upgraded. We are also hearing from the auditors that companies are having a tough time with the upgrade audits, not all of them, but a significant number.

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We have gotten overwhelming response to the Guidances that we have been sending for the last six months or so. These messages have been going to thousands of aerospace organizations, commercial, defense, and military and while we are getting feedback and comments this has primarily been a one-way conversation. Even when we did have conversations with organizations regarding some particular topic of interest, no one else could be participate. That is now changing!

We created this blog as a community site where everyone can participate. Finally we have a way to hear back from you on how you’re doing with your aerospace upgrade efforts and also to provide a forum for you to share with us and each other tips, questions, comments, and experiences. Our desire is that this blog becomes a resource for you to both get and offer help.

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