The Failures of A&D Quality Systems

Existing Quality Systems for A&D

A certificate is a piece of paper, not a quality guarantee. Quality standards provide the appearance of compliance without real substance.

Can you be truly confident that your Tier 3 sub-contractor did not purchase counterfeit steel from Russia? Or that your outsourced partners calibrated their inspection tools to appropriate sensitivity?

Industry standards like AS9100 provide a superficial window into the quality control of your manufacturer — at a single point in time.

There are three points of failure here:

1. The Auditor. The entire supply chain quality system is built on the subjective opinions of quality auditors. This bakes fragility into the system because errors by that auditor have substantial downstream consequences.
2. The Single Point in Time. An auditor will inspect a facility once per year. As such, auditors get a narrow snapshot of a facility.
3. The Evidence Presented. The certification system relies on superficial inspections which do not provide a clear picture of a manufacturer’s quality system. A one-day audit cannot provide sufficient detail.

Aerospace supply chains run on antiquated certification systems. There exists at present no credible inspection procedures that provide real-time, granular proof-of-compliance.

The Implications of Poor Quality Systems

When quality inspection procedures break down, quality breakdowns occur and go unrecognised. This disrupts the entire supply chain.

If a Tier 3 electronics manufacturer acquires a counterfeit Russian chip, this propagates downstream. The negative effect spirals as multiple customers integrate this part into their components. Soon the entire system becomes corrupted with counterfeit products.

The AOG Technics scandal demonstrates the compounding impact of a quality breakdown at a single manufacturer.

The quality system breaks down further when customers do not have visibility into the compliance status of their suppliers. When the best visibility a customer can access is an annual audit, an annual source inspection and an FAI, customers lose trust. This is especially true when the default perspective among customers is that there are deep quality irregularities across their supply chain.

A loss of trust, mixed with a background of poor quality, leads to inflexible supply chains. In practice, that means customers are not willing to adopt a new supplier — or technology — because of the strong quality risk associated with this new adoption.

How Better Quality Systems Safeguard our Communities

But throughout history, the adoption of new technologies — whether in the British Industrial Revolution or the American Manufacturing Revolution — has been the foundation of growth & innovation.

In an era of Great Power Competition, this is especially concerning. When we stop innovating in the frontier-industries of technological capacity, we leave our nations vulnerable to exploitation and aggression.

Supply chains are a matter of national security. They are a primary attack vector for adversarial actors, like China and Russia. These actors proactively infiltrate Western A&D supply chains to disrupt present and future capabilities.

This is why, at Carnegie, we draw a direct line from ineffective quality procedures in a single, small machining shop to the existential national security threats of our nations.

The aerospace industry uses antiquated quality systems that do not befit our state of technological progress. There is a certain comedic element to this: that the banality of a Quality Engineer executing tasks by hand is the core constraint on the future of humanity as a spacefaring civilization.

The Future of A&D Quality Systems

The role of the quality profession in the coming century is to inspect and verify the output of AI-executed tasks. It is not to execute those tasks himself — read our other blog for more detail on this.

Adoption of state-of-the-art AI is not a choice that Western manufacturers can take. It is not a pleasantry or a “nice-to-have”. It is instead an adapt-or-die moment. Either Western manufacturers drive human error to zero, or we continue to lose ground to our adversaries.

Today — at this moment — a manufacturer in some facility across the Allied world is making a human error that will go unnoticed. This human error will compound as it climbs the supply chain tree from Tier 4 to OEM.

The result will be a catastrophic quality breakdown. This breakdown will jeopardise the safety of our nations’ soldiers and civilians.

The solution is clear. Adopt a trusted & secure AI-powered Quality Automation System to enable Zero Human Error across A&D supply chains.

Reach out to our sales team today

Dec 26, 2023