It’s a frustrating mess. The International Aerospace Quality Group (IAQG), responsible for development of the AS9100 series of standards, has all but condemned their major stakeholders — including the employers of the very companies the IAQG representatives work for — to a exorbitant and botched rollout of the next editions of the standards. This will impact users of AS9100, AS9110 and AS9120.
The short version: due to internal delays and general incompetence, alongside pressures from international publishers seeking only to maintain their revenue stream, all three standards will be published later than expected, while the original 3-year implementation window remains fixed. This means the ultimate deadline for implementing the new AS standards won’t be three years at all, but only two. Given that ISO 9001 users are struggling to meet the 3 year deadline, and AS9100 includes additional requirements on top of ISO 9001, it’s a recipe for disaster.
As usual, the Accreditation Bodies and Certification Bodies are worsening the situation, fumbling to update their own systems, procedures and auditor training, and in some cases still waiting for IAQG to release the accompanying auditing rules and requirements. This means that by the time AS9100 is published, the registrars will only be starting to update their procedures, making it likely that they won’t be ready to even begin auditing until late 2017 or early 2018. This means the entire aerospace industry will be scrambling for audits during the same 9-month time period of January-September 2018. Given that the AS auditor pool has shrunk, due to the retirement and (yes) deaths of their elderly auditors, there simply aren’t enough auditors to accommodate that crush. There’s no rush by healthy bodies to replenish the auditor supply either, since the job is utter shit, pays poorly, and requires one to permanently abandon their family. That all but ensures the auditors who remain will be… well, not the cream of the crop.
Already, representatives form within Honeywell, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon have told me privately they have no idea how they will bring their own divisions up to speed in time, nor how they will see their suppliers make the deadline. I tell them they ultimately have the control, since they can simply fire the dummies on the IAQG who work for them. To be honest, though, that may not stop it, since these people have a habit of coming back as “retired aerospace executives” even after they’ve been fired, like a zombie apocalypse version of the Peter Principle.
The registrars don’t much care. If companies lose their AS9100 certificates because of an arbitrary deadline set by the IAQG Registration Management Committee wannabe tyrants, they only stand to make money on the prospect. A client that loses its AS9100 certification must re-apply to their CB as if they were a new client, forcing an entirely new audit, meaning more audit days and fees to be paid to the registrar. As usual, they don’t see the longer view, that many companies will just drop AS9100 — and ISO 9001 — entirely, giving a big, fat middle finger to the Tim Lee, Bill Tate and Susie Neal crowd at IAQG. The registrars can simply point back to the IAQG and say, with reasonable truth this time, “hey, it’s not our fault.”
As usual, Oxebridge is doing the heavy lifting for the industry. Using the Ballot Draft as a model, we have developed an Early AS9100 Rev D Upgrade service, and have already implemented it with a number of clients. Using the feedback and lessons learned, we have formally rolled out the program, and will update the resulting systems — for free — if there are any changes in the final released edition. This applies to AS9110 Rev C and AS9120 Rev B as well. This means that Oxebridge clients will be ready from Day Zero to push the button on their updated certification audits, waiting only for their registrars to catch up. Our clients will be first in line.
Which has made things even weirder. The CBs have now started to approach us for advice. They want to know what we are seeing, how we are implementing, in order to train their auditors on what to expect. It’s an unusual position to be advising the same companies that are normally trying to shut us down for forcing them to abide by accreditation rules, but it also proves that we are more than willing to “play nice” when they approach us from the right posture. You know, the posture where they aren’t defaming us or threatening to have us murdered.
The good news is that the changes to the new AS9100 standards are not severe. Like ISO 9001:2015, they are significant in volume, but not in impact. Much of it is rewording to comply with the (godawful) Annex SL structure developed by Anne-Marie Warris and her gang of ISO TMB would-be school board administrators, none of whom know how to adjust their seat backs and tray tables properly, never mind have any experience in aerospace. But to their credit the IAQG has once again cleaned up the ISO 9001 language and improved on it — to the extent that they could — making it an easier read. The most significant changes companies can expect are related to the major ISO 9001 changes (COTO and RBT), alongside new requirements for counterfeit part control. To help address this latter point, I’ve partnered with major players in the counterfeit part reporting industry to ensure our methods reach the industry high bar for compliance.
So, yes, this all sucks, as usual. The IAQG is so divorced from reality, they are not even aware of what their own employers want, much less what devastation they are raining down upon the industry. But until someone sues the pants off of them in a class action antitrust lawsuit, we’re stuck. I think that at least Oxebridge will provide some hopeful path forward.
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Christopher Paris is the founder and VP Operations of Oxebridge. He has over 35 years’ experience implementing ISO 9001 and AS9100 systems, and helps establish certification and accreditation bodies with the ISO 17000 series. He is a vocal advocate for the development and use of standards from the point of view of actual users. He is the writer and artist of THE AUDITOR comic strip, and is currently writing the DR. CUBA pulp novel series. Visit www.drcuba.world
