AS9100 and the Awareness Requirements

Although AS9100 REV D requirements for your Quality Management System (QMS) is built on top of the ISO9001:2015 standard, there are a few areas where the requirements of the Aerospace standard are different or there are additional requirements, AS9100D Clause 7.3 for Awareness is one oof those areas.  

Clause 7.3 - Awareness 

This section of the standard is all about ensuring that everyone who needs to know about your system does. A key element here is the clause says that the organisation shall (i.e., you must do this) ensure that persons doing work under the organisation's control are aware what's going on within the quality management system, where ISO9001 only lists 4 items: the Quality Policy, Quality Objectives, their contribution to them and the implications of not conforming, AS9100 has an additional 4 things to consider, here's a rundown of all 8.

1. The Quality Policy - Having an awareness of the quality policy is more than just being able to see it on the wall or having a copy of it in your handbook. You need to ensure that everyone understands the background to it and how it supports the organisational approach and your goals.
2. Quality Objectives – Knowing what the quality objectives are is vital, how else do people help you achieve them? Knowing them however isn't enough, people have to understand their part in the objectives and how their own objectives contribute to meeting the higher goals.
3. Knowing their contribution to the effectiveness of the QMS and the benefits of improved performance may sound obvious but more often than not people don't get this part of the discussion. They need to know how they fit into the larger picture, that they are involved and important to its success. They also need to understand how working within a system like AS9100 will help them and the organisation continuously improve.
4. The implications of not conforming to the AS9100D system. This isn't about punishing people this is about the result in terms of customer outcomes, your products and lets face it when it comes to aviation, space and defence a non-conformance in a process or a product could be the difference between a plane taking off or not, a satellite working when it reaches orbit (or not) even life and death.
5. The relevant quality management system documented information and changes thereto, in other words, they need to know about your documentation, where to find it, how to understand it, how it impacts what they need to do and importantly when it's changed. The last part is key and where many organisation fall over. They may have a great change process in terms of controlling the changes but ensuring that everyone is made aware of the change becomes a problem.
6. Their contribution to product or service conformity – this is really about understanding their part of the puzzle and supports the notion of not passing along non-conforming work to someone else. Each person must understand how they contribute to the overall product or service you deliver, what happens if their part isn't right and what to do about it, plus the impacts of that.
7. Their contribution to product safety - as you can imaging AS9100 for aviation, space and defence is a safety focused document and as an industry group those involved in the aviation, space and defence tend to be the same so that's great. Yet you do need to ensure that everyone understands how they impact the safety of the product, the processes being used, the day-to-day activities. This understanding however isn't limited to just your employees, remember at the start we mentioned you also need to think about the contractors, so you need to have a process for making sure they also understand.
8. The importance of ethical behaviour – this one can be a bit of a challenge, not so much in the understanding that you need to behave in an ethical manner, most companies shave clauses in employment contracts around that. The challenge can come about what is deemed ethical and not ethical and not just within your organisation. What is ethical for you may not be the same at a sub-contractor in a different company or a different country. You need to clearly define what you believe to be acceptable and not acceptable and make sure everyone knows it.

A key part here to keep in mind all the way through clause 7.3 of AS9100D is the phrase "organisation's control", so as well as your employees, you should also be ensuring that any contractors you use are also fully aware of your Quality Management System requirements and the requirements of the standard.

So, what constitutes awareness? Well, if we look at the ISO9100 fundamentals document as a guide, "Awareness is attained when people understand their responsibilities and how their actions contribute to the achievement of the organisation's objectives". The next question then is how do you demonstrate that? Well, it has a lot to do with good communication and training.

For a start the requirement to work within the organisations quality management system could be a clause in their employment contract but better still when people joining your organisation, ensure they are properly trained on the system with a thorough induction that is well structured and well documented. Carry out assessments to measure their understanding and give them support where they don't meet the grade yet. Within people's annual objectives there should be a direct link back to the quality management objectives, not word for word but in a fashion that makes sense for their role within the organisation so that they can control the outcome and own that objective.

Importantly throughout someone's involvement with the organisation either directly as an employee or as a sub-contractor, ensure that you have documented evidence of any training or communication that you have given people as part of the process of building awareness of your AS9100D QMS. For your sub-contractors the requirement to ensure awareness also falls into your auditing process in terms of confirming their awareness as does your internal processes about how you communicate any requirements to sub-contractors.

The days of pointing to a folder and asking someone to just read that to tick off a box are long gone and organisations need to think about how they can achieve all of this as easily and repeatably as possible.