OCAP – On-Time Delivery & Conformity of Delivered Product or Service

AS9100sec. 5.1.2 “Customer Focus”, already requires (1) On-Time Delivery and (2) Conformity of Delivered Product or Service to have “Quality Objectives” associated with them (as KPIs - Key Performance Indicators).

AS9100, sec. 5.1.2 “Customer Focus”
Top management shall demonstrate leadership and commitment with respect to customer focus by ensuring that:
d. product and service conformity and on-time delivery performance are measured and appropriate action is taken if planned results are not, or will not be, achieved.

These metrics are also required to be monitored and reviewed in AS9100, sections: 9.1.2 & 9.3.2

A problem that I often see in many AS9100 companies is management establishing “Quality Objectives” based on the “average” of the KPI data. This approach guarantees that they will fail to achieve their “Quality Objectives” half of the time. Referring to AS9104/1A, Table 7 - “Organizational Risk Determination”, shown above, this approach would categorize them as a “High” risk company.

Other Aerospace companies take a conservative approach by establishing “Quality Objectives” that are easily achieved.

For example, a company with a Quality Objective of 97% OTD… but only achieving 95%, will score more poorly than a company that established a Quality Objective of 90% OTD and achieved 91% OTD. If this sounds like IAQG is promoting mediocrity… there is another piece to the puzzle.

If you have one or more customers issuing “Supplier Score Cards”, whatever objectives and minimum goals they establish are considered to be your required Quality Objectives by the CBs. This is intended to circumvent companies from establishing easily achievable Quality Objectives. However, since the majority of AS91xx companies are small… and do not receive “Supplier Score Cards”, this reveals that IAQG is actually focused on the “significant few” (suppliers) rather than the “trivial many”.

It could be argued that CB auditors will be more closely examining the quality improvements taking place (Ref. AS9100, sec. 10.3, “Continual Improvement”) to ensure that companies establishing easily achieved “Quality Objectives” (to be classified as “Low” risk companies) are still improving. If they aren't seeing improvements, or if a company has the same Quality Objectives year after year, they're being “encouraged” to issue a nonconformity citing AS9100:

5.2.1 Establishing the Quality Policy
Top management shall establish, implement, and maintain a quality policy that:
d. includes a commitment to continual improvement of the quality management system.

A nonconformity would read something like: The organization has not effectively demonstrated its “commitment to continual improvement of the quality management system.”

However, there are MANY quality improvements that can be made that do not directly impact the required “Quality Objectives” (e.g., scrap reduction, SMED / Set-up Time, reducing employee time-to-competence through more effective training).

Consequently, if your company does not receive “Supplier Score Cards”, and management insists upon establishing aggressive (delusional/unrealistic) “Quality Objectives”, receiving additional audit time due to being classified as a “High” risk company is entirely “self-inflicted”.

In order to meet the requirements AS9100 and realize “value” from these KPIs, management “should” input this data to a “Process Capability Analysis” to determine what their actual process is capable of achieving. These charts are normally unilateral with an automatically calculated control limit and trend line. This allows management to make better-informed decisions and even identify problems earlier by tracking trends (which may be seasonal).

Use the control limit(s) established by the “Process Capability Charts” to determine what your “quality objectives” should be (for purposes of AS9100). Improvements should be driven by data-based management - rather than emotion-based management (e.g., “pie-in-the-sky” objectives that ignore the reality reflected in the process capability charts).