Quality standards are vital to managing the global nature of today’s aerospace industry, whether for Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) or suppliers. At the same time, the trend toward globalisation means the number of standards, regulations and standards related organisations any one aerospace company has to deal with continues to grow.
Maintaining standards compliance across different Quality Management Systems (QMS) as specified by various bodies has become far more demanding than ever. From research required for standards selection, to verifying the reliability of information used, to reporting and documentation, the added time and costs associated with maintaining standards compliance have created new business challenges for companies in the aerospace industry. Fortunately, these increased compliance expectations for aerospace manufacturers and suppliers can be effectively dealt with through careful and methodical research of the particular standards that apply in each case, and through the adoption of an effective company-wide strategy for managing standards, codes and specifications.
Challenges & Issues Of Today’s Standards Climate
Despite the universal proliferation of standards over the last four decades, there is no single QMS or standards-related organisation that provides truly global standards. Furthermore, despite the ever increasing number of standards-related bodies, there is no single organisation to regulate compliance to the multiple standards continually being created. Rather, the responsibility for compliance management falls on the shoulders of the aerospace manufacturers and suppliers themselves.
Given the requirement to employ standards, on the surface it can seem obvious that companies need to take a ‘best practice’ approach for managing their standards acquisition and usage. Frequently, however, senior management objects to the cost of individual standards based on the price of obtaining and legally using standards.
This narrow focus on the cost of an individual standard ignores all the underlying costs of not properly managing standards, such as blind referencing of standards, duplicate purchasing of standards across the organisation, lack of version control and the risk of using outdated standards, and the potential for copyright abuse — let alone the quality and liability risks associated with improper application of standards.
Version control, for example, is one serious possible consequence of poor standards management. This is potentially a major issue in the aerospace industry, where standards may change periodically and, unfortunately, not on any kind of regular schedule.
ASTM International alone has averaged nearly 300 new documents, revisions, re - approvals, or withdrawals every month — and that is just one standards development organisation. Without a system in place to ensure that only the most up-to-date standards are employed, companies run the risk of additional development cycles, rework or, most importantly, product failures.
Copyright abuse is another potential consequence of improper standards management, and it is a problem that, not surprisingly, has only grown more challenging with the rise of the Internet.
The web makes it easy to find, copy and illegally distribute documents. Organisations that do not establish and enforce strict policies designed to eliminate copyright abuse may find themselves at risk of violating national and international laws. They could face lawsuits brought by the copyright owners and spend significant amount of time and money on fighting legal sanctions and, ultimately, in penalties and damages.
Six Steps To Effective Standards Management
For many companies, understanding the larger organisational implications and risks of poor standards management outlined above is the first step towards getting their standards management approach up to speed. As an organisation looks to improve its standards management, the following six steps can provide a roadmap for progress:
1. Ensure access
This means that those who need access to standards in fact have that access where and when they need it. If people do not have what they need, they will find some other way to cope, whether or not they are in compliance with the organisation’s policies.
2. Keep standards use consistent.
Dating back to the days of Eli Whitney and Henry Ford, manufacturers have recognised that consistent, repeatable processes are the key to efficiency and productivity on the plant floor.
Similarly, you should ensure that employees have consistent, repeatable processes to access the standards content they need. This kind of consistency breeds productivity, quality, and speed that businesses need in order to react to a changing environment.
3. Purchase standards from a reliable source
Make sure that you have the licensing in place that you need, that you are covered legally and from a copyright standpoint, and that you are able to get the updates that you need in a timely manner. Your standards provider must be a good partner to your business and support your goals.
4. Avoid copyright abuse
Violating the copyright on a standard can present legal challenges to your company, and those problems are only made more serious when a lack of proper controls leads to systematic, unchecked abuses. Again, ensuring access is crucial to avoid having employees ‘do it their way’ and thereby expose the company to the risk of copyright abuse.
5. Understand usage
Business intelligence is increasingly important to all companies. With regard to standards, ‘doing business intelligently’ means being able to answer questions like: How is the content being used, who needs which content, and how frequently do they need it? Do they immediately need updates, or do they need historical content through the lifecycle? What are the patterns that are going to govern your needs as a business and therefore drive your standards requirements?
6. Stay current
This last priority is particularly important for any discussion of standards in the aerospace industry, based on the regulatory requirements and the increased risks that this industry faces. In part, this means having a reliable source, but your standards management partner also must know when things change and be able to react quickly by providing the right information at the right time to the right members of your team.
Choosing The Right Standards Management Capabilities
With those six steps in mind, what do effective enabling technology capabilities for standards management look like?
Starting with the need for reliable access, effective standards management tools should provide anytime, anywhere access to all the necessary content. ‘Necessary,’ in this case, includes standards that you need today, but also content that you might need tomorrow to keep up with changes in an ever evolving industry.
This is particularly important in an industry where companies are under pressure to maintain strict adherence to the latest regulatory requirements, and where the standards required may vary year to year. The breadth of standards covered should include comprehensive, up-to-date standards from multiple SDOs active in your industry.
You also must look for tools that provide fast search and study capabilities, providing access to the ‘right’ content at the right time. Users should not have to spend too much time searching for the standards they need, so having an effective discovery process is an important building block for your standards management.
Search should be intuitive, offering robust filtering options, with full-text search and ‘redline’ (or ‘version comparison’ ) capabilities. In addition, the ability to mark ‘favourites’ within the system and to set up automated email alerts when changes are made to a standard will allow for ongoing monitoring of frequently used standards.
Finally, to enable a consistent process, your standards management tools should provide for uniform shared access to standards in way that ensures that even globally dispersed teams are able to ‘work off the same sheet of paper’. Team members ought to have the same process for how they obtain and apply standards, and that process should be built into the tools that the team uses.
Companies looking to adopt standards management tools inevitably must ask themselves whether it is better to build or buy a standards management solution. It is possible to ‘do it yourself’, and a company can go out and individually acquire the standards it needs.
However, this ‘go it alone’ approach carries the risk of having staff spend the bulk of their time on requirements collection, data acquisition, and document management rather than on actually analysing and employing the information they require — again creating delays and impairing the company’s ability to respond rapidly to the changing environment.
Leveraging a provider of standards management solutions, on the other hand, shifts the responsibility for data collection to the information provider and can significantly compress the time that your staff must spend on collection and aggregation. That can free up your resources to devote more time to applying the standards in practice, as well as making decisions more quickly, cutting time to market and improving your ability to react to changes in the landscape.
Carpe Diem — Where To Get Started?
For companies throughout the aerospace supply chain, standards management can represent a significant opportunity to seize ‘low hanging fruit’ to lower costs, reduce risk, and improve market performance simply through the better use of tools and techniques to manage the standards they already use.
If you wish to embrace standards management within your company, you can follow three simple steps to seize this opportunity:
1. First, establish a formal priority around standards management. That means enlisting executive sponsorship that can drive this initiative within the organisation, sell the importance of standards management to other functions or business units, and endorse funding of the project at an adequate level.
2. Next, engage with internal specialists and external experts to look at current use, inventorying the current library of standards, and understanding how staff members access standards, as well as the current and future needs for standards within the company.
3. Finally, the road to better standards management will involve eliminating paper from the process, digitising and automating access at the desktop level from a single reliable source (or as few sources as practical), and investing in a corporate-wide standards management tool suited to the requirements of your company and its industry.
The aerospace industry is highly advanced, highly competitive and highly regulated, with literally hundreds of standards for all aspects of development, manufacturing, use, and disposal — not to mention the myriad of regulations.
As this article has discussed, improving standards management offers aerospace companies benefits in terms of mitigating the risks attendant to standards but also in terms of the ability to meet customer requirements faster. Put in this way, improved standards management is clearly shown to be a competitive weapon that should be in the arsenal of every aerospace company today.
