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Quality Control in the Global
Aerospace and Defense Manufacturing Industries

Traceability, quality, safety, and compliance are top concerns for Defense and global Aerospace OEMs and tier suppliers.

Global Aerospace and Defense Quality Control

The global Aerospace and Defense industries (A&D industries) encompass civilian and military needs for aircraft, helicopters, missiles, satellites, and other products that are held to the highest safety and quality standards. Aerospace and Defense OEMs and tier suppliers build their products using expensive materials and high precision processes, and often operate in short-run and high-mix/low-volume production environments. Aerospace and Defense manufacturers face industry trends such as:

  • Continuing demand for quality control and certification
  • Increasingly complex global supply chains and competition
  • Increasing demand for shorter production cycles

To address these challenges, quality managers in the Aerospace and Defense industries need real-time visibility—within plants and across the globe—to proactively:

  • Increase quality through continuous improvements
  • Prevent and respond quickly to recalls
  • Ensure certification compliance

 

Improve global aerospace and defense manufacturing with SPC quality systems.

InfinityQS® founders and chief executives cut their teeth as engineers at Hughes Aircraft, Boeing, and Honeywell Aerospace, and we’ve been building on that foundation of Aerospace and Defense industry expertise ever since.

Drive continuous A&D industry improvement

Today, manufacturers need real-time and accurate SPC data that is visible from the production floor to the corner office. And quality managers need visibility within plants, across multiple facilities, and around the world, to drive continuous improvements by:

  • Prioritizing process improvement efforts
  • Comparing production line capability
  • Ensuring product conformity

InfinityQS Statistical Process Control (SPC) software provides these capabilities in real time, even for short-run and high-mix/low-volume production environments, by using advanced statistical techniques. Manufacturers with very small lot sizes and multiple key characteristics on each part use InfinityQS solutions to analyze process consistency across product setups. And monitoring precision tool wear and quick changeovers is no problem.
 

With InfinityQS cloud-based solutions, organizations gain real-time visibility into their suppliers’ shop floor quality data before nonconforming product even ships. This enhanced level of supplier monitoring can:

  • Eliminate source inspections and Certificates of Analysis (COA)
  • Reduce inventories
  • Provide additional quality improvements and cost savings

Global Aerospace and Defense Traceability

InfinityQS solutions provide a track-and-trace lot genealogy solution across the entire A&D supply chain, enabling Aerospace and Defense OEM and tier suppliers to:

  • Significantly reduce the time and costs of recalls
  • Take proactive steps to prevent recalls
  • Easily control documents and produce reports
Ensure traceability in global aerospace manufacturing.

Certification compliance

Compliance with government safety standards such as the FAA, JAA, NASA, and ISO requirements for Quality Management Systems (QMS) is a given for Aerospace and Defense OEM and tier suppliers. InfinityQS software provides quality managers with real-time documentation and reporting to:

  • Always be audit ready with reports to support internal or external auditing activities
  • Significantly reduce audit and certification time and cost
Certification compliance is priority for aerospace manufacturing organizations.

Aerospace & Defense industry compliance

InfinityQS software supports Aerospace and Defense OEM and tier suppliers in meeting government and industry standards for traceability, quality, safety, and compliance. Our robust solutions can stand up to third-party (IAQG) audits. The Unified Data Repository pulls data from disparate systems to provide the reporting manufacturers need to prevent recalls, reduce the time and costs of recalls, and access audit-ready documentation that significantly reduces audit and certification time and costs.

Lot Genealogy reports provide a comprehensive view of the incoming/outgoing product relationship, complete with statistical summary information.

InfinityQS's Lot Genealogy and Reporting functionality supports AS 9100C:2009 7.5.3 traceability requirements enabling Aerospace and Defense suppliers and manufacturers to track raw materials or component lot codes throughout manufacturing operations. For investigation purposes, genealogical "trees" can be created for any lot.

These reports allow you to determine:
  • Materials used in the production of a specific finished lot
  • Where incoming raw materials were consumed
  • Root causes of nonconforming lots
  • Information critical for responding to product recalls
  • Which final lots were created from incoming lots
Dynamic Scheduler
You can incorporate work-instruction requirements at the production-floor level, providing automatic data collection prompts to operators. InfinityQS’s real-time Dynamic Scheduler offers visual checklists to operators, reminding them when to perform critical quality checks.

You can specify unique, time-based intervals based on the product, process, or even the workstation. Windows automatically pop up, clearly identifying when data collections are due. If a failure is detected or if no data is collected, ProFicient can automatically send notifications, email administrators, or even force users to specify assignable cause codes and corrective actions. 

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Audits are made easier with real-time, instant access to all the quality records and electronic documentation needed to demonstrate compliance. This robust solution that can stand up to third-party (IAQG) certification audits or internal audits for Quality Management Systems (QMS) that require ISO 9001:2008, AS 9100C:2009, EN9100:2009, and JIS Q 9100:2009. Creating reports takes only minutes instead of hours or days, eliminating the need for spreadsheets.

InfinityQS solutions boast built-in checklist- and workflow-alerting features needed to comply with QMS SPC requirements for key product characteristics, Critical Quality Attributes (CQAs), and Critical Process Parameters (CPP).

ProFicient also offers Audit Trail Logging which provides a history of all changes made to any database record including sample data limits, alarm rules, change history, metadata, specification limits, and control limits.

The strict access control features in ProFicient support requirements for electronic signatures including Password Aging, Recycling, Lockouts, Length, and Encryption. The Security Violation Logs track and report security violations by individual users and their locations. Access Logs track individual user access into and out of applications.
 
When enabled, Database Auditing provides full traceability for any modification, edit, or change to any database record. Traceability records are easily viewed in a variety of ways, but they cannot be edited. Whenever a record modification or deletion is attempted, ProFicient’s Reason for Change tracking feature forces users to select a reason for the modification from a drop-down list. Additionally, free-form comments are required. When specified, a Change History and Reason for Change Report can accompany any chart printout.
 

Consider the Advantages of the Cloud with Dedicated ProFicient on Demand 


InfinityQS’s powerful cloud-based quality solution Dedicated ProFicient on Demand (PoD) provides real-time data analysis and decision making while lowering ownership costs. 

Manufacturers in regulated industries and those that require direct control over software access and features can have all the advantages of the cloud—in a private, unshared environment—with a Dedicated PoD subscription. 

Learn more about the value of a ProFicient on Demand dedicated subscription. 

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