Company-wide implementation of a quality management system according to EN 9100 requires, first and foremost, rethinking and describing how the company works in terms of abstract entities called processes. As a matter of definition one could say that a process takes something, no matter what, and transforms it into something new. When making soup, for example, the cooked vegetables would be the inputs, the act of mixing itself would be the process, and the resulting soup would be the output of the process. Business processes should be described in a similar manner; they take something as their input, perform some transformation/work on them, and as a result deliver some kind of outputs. The sales process for example starts from a list of possible customers as it's input, contacts, meets and convinces these customers, and generates signed deals as its output.
Aspects of a company's working can be described at different levels of detail. At the highest level of abstraction a company may be thought of as taking customer orders as it's inputs, processing these in a number of steps, and delivering finished goods as its outputs. When thinking of how the company functions in a little more detail, a number of top-level processes will become apparent. In a typical industrial company one might find the following processes:
After having defined a sensible number of top-level processes, a next step analyses how these processes communicate with each other and with the outside world. Processes are said to communicate by means of interfaces, at which they take the outputs of another process as their inputs, or generate outputs to be used by other processes. The production process will for example take its inputs from the purchasing process, under the form of raw materials, from the planning process in terms of priorities and machine occupation, from the design department for machine instructions, and so on. At its turn the production process might feed its outputs to the delivery department, more then likely these will however pass by quality control and quality assurance departments first.
Once the company has been described in terms of top-level processes and interfaces between them, a next step in implementing the quality management system consists in judging if a process is functioning well or not, with other words, evaluating its performance. How well a production process function could for example be measured by the number of parts it produces in a week, or the benefit that's generated from selling them, one could however also bring this number back to what is generated by each person or machine. This performance analysis of a process is an essential part of the EN 9100 quality management system, and it is one of the main reasons why the norm requires the generation of an abstract company description that allows such performance measurement.
Apart from requiring an abstract process description to be created, the EN 9100 standard furthermore enforces a number of other requirements onto the different processes. Independently of the kind of products or services a company offers, or to which standards of quality it performs those, each certified company needs to uphold good practices in terms of:
All companies considered to have a quality management system respecting EN 9100 can be found in the OASIS database (Online Aerospace Supplier Information System).
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