Featuring the improvements to the 9102 Rev C

In this podcast, our guest Carl Zimmerman, IAQG IDS for the 9102 Standard and quality auditor for Spirit AeroSystems, shares valuable insights on the changes and improvements to the 9102 Revision C. 

Zimmerman sheds light on the key aspects of the revision, the important roles of the writing team, and how the SCMH played an important role in enhancing quality processes across the supply chain.

The mass interest in this revision is in part due to its extensive utilization, surpassing other industry standards. The 9102 standard impact trickles down to suppliers, encompassing a significant segment of the supply base. 

Click on the link to listen to the SCMH 3.2 First Article Inspection FAI Webinar recorded on 24, August 2023 https://scmh.iaqg.org/scmh-make/#1613168639802-160461ef-d42c

The IAQG is the International Aerospace Quality Group and sets the standard for quality within the worldwide supply chain within the aviation, space, and defense industry. IAQG currently maintains 26 active standards that establish common/shared tools and methods for quality improvement. To learn more, visit https://iaqg.org.  

Transcript

The Quality Horizon – Improvements to the 9102 Rev C 

Susan Matson: [00:00:00] Greetings everyone and welcome. I'm your host Susan Matson and with me today is Carl Zimmerman. Carl is the Core Quality Auditor for Spirit AeroSystems, and he's also the IAQG's International Document Sponsor for the 9102 Standard. Welcome to the show Carl.  

Carl Zimmerman: Thank you.  

Susan Matson: Thanks. So Carl, I hear there's some news to share. The 9102 has a new revision. Revision C, that must really feel good, doesn't it?  

Carl Zimmerman: Yes, it's taken us quite a while longer than expected to get the standard revised and out some of the revision process and going through the, all the comments. And then there were some delays through technical writing and it was finally made it through publication.  

Susan Matson: Wonderful. For some of our listeners who may not know what the 9102 standard is, can you tell us can you give us a little highlight of that standard and who uses it?  

Carl Zimmerman: The 9102 standard is the standard for first article inspections. It's driven from 9100 8.5.1.3, the requirement to perform first articles. So it's used by aerospace OEMs and suppliers that have 9100 and flow that requirement down that the first articles are performed per the 9102 standard, and then there's also uses in medical space, and even MROs are using the standard also even though it's not a requirement that they do they use it just for consistency when they flow down requirements.  

Susan Matson: That is, that, that's a lot of people probably globally [00:02:00] that are touching this standard. With so much interest between this Rev V that was out and now this newly released Rev C, what are some of those key changes or things that happened and occurred over between the two that you want to highlight? 

Carl Zimmerman: So we went through and tried to make several clarifications throughout the document. Some of the key additions or changes that was done in the revision was we added a option for a detailed C of C for special processes in lieu of a first article, there wasn't a lot of first articles being done by the special processors and it was an issue in the industry, a lot of customers were accepting CFCs from the processors and then filling out the first article information themselves. [00:03:00] So we tried to add something in that matched what was happening in the industry and put a little more structure to it and requirements that all the characteristics had to be documented on the C of C for it to replace the first article for a special process. 

Carl Zimmerman: We also removed the exemption for unique single runs. This exemption was highly misinterpreted or misunderstood. One of the examples that was in the standard for a unique single run was out of production spare that was only made once. There was people that interpreted it for all spares, so they didn't perform first articles on any spares that they produced. 

Carl Zimmerman: There was also people that use that to get around first articles. [00:04:00] There was examples that came up during our conversations where they had a customer that received parts from their supplier with no first article, it was a three year contract and they ran all the parts for the contract in one run so that they wouldn't have to perform a first article on it and could say it was a unique single run. 

Carl Zimmerman: In looking at it, we found that it was misused more than than it was to exempt it where there wasn't as much value in performing a first article there. So the decision was made to just remove that unique single run exemption. There are cases that it will create more work for a supplier, but overall, it created a consistency throughout the industry that it was better to not have that clause in [00:05:00] the standard.  

Carl Zimmerman: The balloon drawings that was actually in the first revision of the 9102 standard and revision a removed it and it wasn't in revision B either, although most of the customers expected it when we went through and, and check to see what other additional documents besides the forms were always required by customers. 

Carl Zimmerman: That was the only document that all other customers seem to require. That was above the forms and it wasn't a requirement of the standards. So we went ahead and added that as a requirement, requirement of the standard, which is back to the first revision of 9102. And then we also did changes like changed the definition [00:06:00] for design characteristics to exclude the specifications. 

Carl Zimmerman: We went and changed complete, not complete was misinterpreted or misunderstood. On whether the first article was finished or whether it had nonconformance is against the first article. So we changed it to simply is does the 1st article have a nonconformance in it? Yes or no. And then. 

Carl Zimmerman: A couple of the other changes were that are major impacting was the potential to affect fit form or function was changed to are the characteristics invalidated by the change. And then there was a few changes to the forms like adding a reason for partial part type making it a requirement that the first article has a secondary review and the signature lines were [00:07:00] removed on forms two and three.  

Susan Matson: That sounds like there was a lot of changes. Now I understand why so many people are interested in knowing more of what's, what happened. With the release of Rev Z, I do have a question. I know that it's published, is it published globally? That was something I heard in a previous conversation.  

Carl Zimmerman: It was published in the Americas and Europe's at the end of June. It is still working through the translation stage for the Asia Pacific standard. And is expected to be published in the next couple months. But it has not been published there yet. 

Susan Matson: Okay, perfect. And I'm assuming there'll be a notification that comes out when that happens in for the for that sector or that part of the world.  

Carl Zimmerman: Yes, I will.  

Susan Matson: With all of these changes that you just noted, and I'm sure those are just the highlights. There were others. [00:08:00] The writing team, as you were developing this revision, worked in tandem with the SEMH group, and I'm assuming most of the team doubled on both to help also write some guidance material. I'm assuming with some of these changes, you need a little bit of an explanation of how to use them and what to do with them. So can you talk about some of those? Those additional materials that people have available to them.  

Carl Zimmerman: Yeah, as we were going through the standard, we would disposition the comments when we talked about them as to things that needed to put in the standard, or maybe it was additional guidance that, needed to be done. 

Carl Zimmerman: So we would disposition some of the comments that we would address them in the guidance material as we worked through the standard, we came up with we should produce a manual similar to what 9145 did with explanations [00:09:00] on on different sections of the standard. And we went through and put the intent of the sections. 

Carl Zimmerman: If we had further explanation, we added it into the manual also. And then we tried to do a best practice or common mistakes for those sections. Also one of the other things that was brought up was example first articles. So we took a first article engineering package, and we went through And created the first article forms off of that to make an example that people could follow on how to fill out the first article forms from an engineering package two D we are still planning on making a three D example, but haven't got that completed yet. 

Susan Matson: So more to come  [00:10:00]  then, huh?  

Carl Zimmerman: Yes.  

Susan Matson: Wonderful. Okay. So I know not too long ago, you had a webinar that you held regarding some of these updates and regarding the guidance material specifically to through the SCMH PSCI group. And There were a lot of questions. Are there any of those questions that weren't a comment here just because they seem to be something that really bubbled to the top in terms of how people need to use first article inspection requirement, that's the standard or were the changes that might be a little more challenging to understand. 

Carl Zimmerman: What most people had a concern with was a transition time period wanting to know how long they had to be compliant with the new version. The IAQG, since it's not a certification standard, does not give a transition time period so they'll have to work with their customers, and then the other part [00:11:00] that adds into it is many of the suppliers use a first article software until the first article software is updated to the new forms they wouldn't be able to transition. 

Carl Zimmerman: So some of it's reliant on when the customer. Requires them to transition and when the software companies will be ready for them to transition with a new version of software to account for all of the changes.  

Susan Matson: So, it could be different.  

Carl Zimmerman: It could be different times. Yeah. For different suppliers. Some of them when we talk to customers, some of them have contracts where they may not have to transition to the new revision for the life of the contract. So until the contract expires, they can actually stay on revision B. And so that's, that was one of the concerns they were looking for a hard transition date and [00:12:00] one doesn't really exist. 

Susan Matson: That makes I can understand that caused her concern. Were there any other concerns about transitioning to the new standard?  

Carl Zimmerman: A couple of the questions that came up during the webinar were the definition of design characteristics that changed that no longer includes specifications in the definition of design characteristics. 

Carl Zimmerman: So that'll be, a change for the way some of some of the people count for specification characteristics within their first articles. And some of the OEMs will flow down an additional requirement for those characteristics to be accounted for, even though it's no longer a requirement of the standard.  

Carl Zimmerman: The other item that came up that we've heard on before is confusion on how to extract the characteristics for [00:13:00] model based definition. And that's been an ongoing concern. And one of the reasons that we're going to had to develop a example of a model based definition, FAI, that's completed. We just haven't completed that yet. 

Susan Matson: Yeah, and you know what, you dove a tail into my next question about some examples of good practices encouraged by, by the standard and FAI process. I know in that webinar you talked in great length of one of the examples that you had. Can you expand on, might be some good practices here. 

Carl Zimmerman: We went through, and when we developed the manual, we tried to go through section by section and look for any additional guidance, interpretation, background information that might help the users understand. How we came up with the wording or how it was to be interpreted. [00:14:00] We also tried to go through and put any common mistakes that we could think of or best practices for each section. 

Carl Zimmerman: The best practices wouldn't be a requirement, but it's things we've run across in the industry that have worked for some companies, the team, the writing team that we had was pretty diverse and have seen a lot of different examples of problems within the industry or best practices. So they were able to help bring all those forward that we documented in the manual by section. 

Carl Zimmerman: The users should have an idea of these are the mistakes that we've seen repeated, and these are some of the best practices that have been seen from some companies that maybe they want to implement within their own company.  

Susan Matson: That manual sounds like it could be a huge [00:15:00] resource for so many people. So what prompted the development of this revision? Was there a particular incident or was it just a timeframe that you were going on?  

Carl Zimmerman: It was up for the five year review. And so we were looking at it. Some of the people on the previous rewrite team thought that it could go on that. It didn't really need to. And that was the first article standard that needed to be updated. 

Carl Zimmerman: I went ahead and sent a survey out through the IAQG for feedback on if people thought that the first article standard needed to have a revision. There was a couple of things that we knew of that probably should be updated. And that survey came back with, we had close to 380 comments on there of things that people thought needed changed or updated or clarified. So from that, [00:16:00] we decided that it was definitely needed to go into a revision and started planning to revise it at that time.  

Susan Matson: 300 comments sounds like a lot were there repetitive concerns during this revision process or, challenges that you had to address with the team? I'm assuming it wasn't just you. 

Carl Zimmerman: It was a whole team of us that went through it as we went through the rewrite. We had our kickoff meeting in October of 2019 before we could really get into our next meeting COVID hit. So we started doing it all virtually. The team that we had was really great. We started holding meetings. 

Carl Zimmerman: It first started out to be monthly, then we changed it to weekly. And so we met. Two hours a week, almost every week. There was participants not only here in the U. S. but in Europe [00:17:00] and Japan and other parts of Asia those people over there are in different time zones. There was some people that would meet 2 hours a week, every week for almost 3 years, and they were logging on at 9 and 10 o'clock at night to participate in these meetings. 

Carl Zimmerman: So the team put a lot of effort. Into making sure that we went through everything we dispositioned all the comments and we discussed everything that we could think of is for interpretations so that we could put out a good document.  

Susan Matson: My goodness, Carl, I had no idea. I guarantee you a good portion of our listeners also don't. I think the one thing we need to point out is that this is not your day job. These are all members of your team. Who have a job that they're doing nine to five-ish or whatever that timeframe[00:18:00] is. But the IAQG is a volunteer participant role. So all of these people that you are talking about that we're taking hours and hours, that's in addition to their day workload, correct. 

Carl Zimmerman: Yes, it is. And and they did invest a lot of time and going going through this.  

Susan Matson: Round of thanks and applause for everyone, including you. Thank you for putting this together. That is just three years during COVID and everything. Wonder. So I, I don't wanna switch gears, but I do wanna get back to a couple of these other things. 

Susan Matson: So how has this all been received? It's now out in two of the three parts, three sectors that you talked about within the Americas and Europe and the Asia Pacific areas is just shy of having it rolled out. How was it being received? You talked earlier about, clarification and adding structure and removing exemptions. Adding in the balloon and being more consistent. [00:19:00] What are you hearing out there?  

Carl Zimmerman: From what I've heard, it's mostly positive. They like the clarification. We tried to make sure that, uh, it could at least be understood there. There was issues previously where the customer would interpret the standard one way. 

Carl Zimmerman: The suppliers were interpreting it another way. There was just a unaligned expectation of what was to be provided. We tried to work through that to where even if people don't agree with, with what it says, at least it's clear. So then customers, if they have a different expectation, they can flow that down to the suppliers and it can be done contractually. 

Carl Zimmerman: So they're not getting to where they're ready to deliver parts. And then all of a sudden there's a disagreement on the interpretation of the standard. Now, there are some people that, don't like the unique single run exemption was removed [00:20:00] or that it's not required to extract design characteristics from the specific specifications any longer. 

Carl Zimmerman: But we tried to at least make it clear to where if there's a customer that wants something different than those points, they can flow that down contractually if they need to. And then their supplier understands what they have to do to fulfill their first article requirements.  

Susan Matson: Okay. All of this information and then the, and the standard itself you talked about forms. You talked about a manual. We discussed a webinar key changes. There's a lot of documentation that after someone listens to this, They go, where can I find all of that stuff? So can you help our listeners? I know that we've got some information on IAQG.org, and we also have some information on the SCMH, but can you expand on where to find stuff? 

Carl Zimmerman: Yeah, the, under the IAQG forms has the new forms [00:21:00] for the revision C and we went in and left up the left up the forms for revision B currently, because we know that during transition, some people are still going to be using that. When they go into under the 9102 standard there's a resources link and that has the key changes for the new revision, and it also has the FAQs that are for revision B, we've incorporated those into the standard or into the manual, but as again, as people are still transitioning, they may need to go back to those FAQs for the old revision until they completely transitioned to the new revision. 

Carl Zimmerman: So we marked them as a revision B FAQs and left them under the resources. The place that the most information is [00:22:00] under the SCMH section 3.2 for first article inspection. They'll be able to find the webinar that was recorded. It is now posted under that section along with the manual that we created and the example FAIs that we've put out so far. 

Susan Matson: And more will come, right? So as your team continues to develop those, they'll be found most in the SCMH site.  

Carl Zimmerman: Correct.  

Susan Matson: And just to reiterate it, to get to the SCMH site, it's SCMH.IAQG.org. I believe this is under the make model. Correct, Carl?  

Carl Zimmerman: Yes, it is.  

Susan Matson: And it's 3.2 under the make model. Okay. Anything else you wanted to talk about? Did I leave something on the table that we needed to discuss about the, about revision C, about 9102, about the materials, about the team? Is there anything that I missed? 

Carl Zimmerman: No, I think part of the part of the success of the revision [00:23:00] was the team that contributed their time. And we also had a lot of discussions so each of the team members became experts and took the stuff back to their own companies and brought back more information. So there's key resources throughout the industry. For all those people that were active participants on the team. 

Carl Zimmerman: Now they're able to explain it to people within their companies or the suppliers they work with, and they can give a background and more information on the sections or any questions that people have. During this revision, I think was, part of it, we not only revised the standard and made guidance material, but we made several experts throughout the industry that can work with their own companies and help clarify issues that they, that come up. 

Susan Matson: Yes. [00:24:00] And Carl, that raises one more point that we should probably make for people who are listening and have questions that aren't necessarily, easily identified in, in the manual or in the guidance materials. If you are on the SCMH site and you do have a follow up question, you can always contact SCMH among each of the guidance areas and put that information. And that will go right to your team. Correct, Carl? And you're able to respond.  

Carl Zimmerman: Yes, it will.  

Susan Matson: Great. Carl, thank you so much. Thank you. This has been great having a conversation and learning more about these changes to the REV C.  

Carl Zimmerman: Thank you, Susan.  

Susan Matson: Thank you all again for taking the time and listening to us and hearing a little bit more about the 9102 standard and the newly published Revision C. This is Susan Matson, and you have been listening to the IAQG Quality Horizon. Until next time, stay safe.