Today, companies in the aviation and airport sector have to respond to high demands on the quality of its products and processes. In order to prove their suitability, they must be subject to control systems, usually based on certification audits.
Quality certification audits emerged strongly in the last decades of the 20th century, with certification based on the international standard ISO9001 being the most prominent.
The challenge of quality management in the aviation sector is to discern between the standards you really need to implement and the ones you don't.
Engineering companies, among other sectors, invested effort and money to developing its procedures, implementing them and monitoring compliance with them to obtain this certification, which eventually became a prerequisite for the client to use your services.
Later, new certifications were also added, such as ISO 14001 for environmental management or OHSAS 18001 for Health and Safety, which at the beginning were a differentiating factor, but with the passage of time became yet another essential, like ISO 9001.
In addition to those already mentioned, there are specific certifications, such as EN 9100 for quality in the aeronautical sector and the PECAL standards, publications that specify the requirements of the Spanish Ministry of Defence (NATO requirements) for quality management to be met by suppliers in the fulfilment of defence contracts.
We could go on with an endless list of certifications and quality marks, depending on the type of service or product supplied, which, curiously enough, are not always required by the customerThe "contagion effect" caused by the fact that other companies in the competition are certified, which generates a feeling that the client may prefer them because of that extra certificate, a feeling that often seems to be ahead of whether it is really necessary for the activity you carry out.
At present, there is such an accumulation of certifiable standards in the sector, that if they are not appropriately selected and integrated not only do they not promote efficiency, but in many cases they hinder it by involving red tape and bureaucracy which, let us not forget, are not paid for by the customer.
For all these reasons, the challenge of quality management in the aeronautical sector is to discern between the standards that you really need to implement and those that you do not, and to manage to assemble your "puzzle" of certifications under a single integrated management system that includes all the necessary procedures for obtaining the different certifications that are really required, avoiding the addition of worthless steps that incur in cost overruns unnecessary.
This challenge is not an easy one, as it involves continuous modifications to the system in place to adapt to updates in the standards, and at the same time, keeping up to date with the requirements of possible new certifications required... What will be the next one?
