Supplier Management Plan (AS9100 §8.4)

This plan defines how Acme Aerostructures selects, qualifies, monitors and controls the external suppliers that provide material and special-process services for the CWP-700 composite wing panel. It implements AS9100 §8.4 — Control of Externally Provided Processes, Products and Services for this program. Its central premise is aerospace-specific: for a composite structure, the most important things a supplier provides — qualified prepreg, an accredited special process — produce output whose conformity cannot be fully verified by receiving inspection. A cured laminate does not reveal an out-of-spec resin batch on a caliper. So supplier control cannot wait at the receiving dock; it has to move upstream, into qualification and process surveillance. That is the argument this plan is built around.

§8.4

AS9100 clause implemented

Supplier classes (by verifiability)

PPAP

Qualification basis (AS9145)

Quarterly

Performance review cadence (D-04)

DEP-02

Certs gate First Article

01 Why supplier control is a quality control, not a procurement task

On many programs, managing suppliers is a commercial activity — get the price, get the delivery date, inspect on arrival. On a composite aerostructure it is a quality activity, because the defining characteristics of the part are created by processes the receiving inspection cannot see into. AS9100 §8.4 exists precisely for this: it requires the organization to ensure externally provided processes, products and services conform, and to determine the verification needed — with the explicit recognition that some outputs cannot be verified by inspection alone and therefore demand control of the supplier's process, not just its product.

This plan divides the CWP-700 supply base by exactly that criterion — how far conformity can be confirmed after the fact — because that is what determines how much control has to move upstream. It then defines qualification, incoming control, performance monitoring and escalation for each class, and closes with the risks and the one supplier incident (I-05) the program has already learned from.

Owner. S. Pham (Supplier Quality Engineer) owns supplier qualification and performance under this plan, operating the PPAP process and the quarterly review cadence; the Quality Engineering Lead owns the AS9100 QMS this plan sits within, and the PM owns the schedule dependencies supplier performance drives.

02 Supplier classification — by how far conformity can be verified

The supply base is classified not by spend or by commodity but by the one question that governs control: after the supplier delivers, how much of conformity can we still confirm? The less that can be verified downstream, the more control must live in qualification and surveillance upstream.

Class	What they provide	Verifiability after delivery → control emphasis
Special-process	Accredited special processes — composite layup & autoclave cure, in-process NDT — whose output cannot be fully verified by inspection	Low. A cured laminate cannot be un-cured to check the cycle; an internal defect is not visible externally. Control is almost entirely upstream: process qualification, operator certification, NADCAP accreditation, and surveillance of the process itself. Receiving inspection is a backstop, not the primary defense.
Raw-material	Composite prepreg and qualified raw materials with material certifications and out-time control	Partial. Certifications and incoming tests confirm the material meets spec on arrival, but its in-service behaviour depends on handling (freezer control, out-time) the supplier must also govern. Control is qualification (PPAP) plus certificate review plus incoming test.
Hardware & standard	Fasteners, hardware and catalogue items to recognised standards	High. Conformity is dimensionally and materially verifiable on receipt against a standard. Control is conventional: qualified supplier, certificate of conformity, and receiving inspection by sampling.

The classification is a control-allocation decision, not a ranking. A hardware supplier is not "less important" than a special-process supplier — a wrong fastener grounds a panel just as surely. The class determines where the control has to sit. For hardware it can sit at receiving; for a special process it cannot, so it moves to qualification and process surveillance. Getting that allocation wrong — trusting receiving inspection to catch a special-process escape it structurally cannot catch — is the failure mode this plan exists to prevent.

03 Selection & qualification — PPAP before production

No supplier provides flight-hardware material or a special process to this program without qualification, and the qualification basis is PPAP (Production Part Approval Process) under AS9145 — the same discipline the Control Plan applies internally, flowed down to the supply base. PPAP requires the supplier to demonstrate, with objective evidence, that its process reliably produces conforming output before the first production lot is accepted.

Qualification step	What it establishes
Supplier approval & AS9100 flow-down	The supplier holds (or is held to) an equivalent quality system, and the program's requirements — specifications, special-process accreditation, record retention, right of surveillance — are flowed down in the purchase order.
PPAP submission	Material certifications, process records, dimensional results and (for special processes) accreditation evidence, submitted and reviewed before the lot is qualified. This is the gate I-05 showed can fail on completeness, not just content (see §06).
Special-process accreditation (NADCAP)	For processes whose output can't be inspection-verified, third-party NADCAP accreditation plus operator certification substitute for downstream verification — the process is trusted because it is accredited and surveilled, not because the part is inspected.
First-lot acceptance	The first production lot is verified in full against the qualified baseline before ongoing acceptance relaxes. Qualification is earned, not assumed.

Qualification gates the program, not just the purchase. Supplier certifications and PPAP submissions are a hard schedule dependency: DEP-02 on the RAIDD log makes raw-material supplier certifications a prerequisite that must be in hand before First Article Inspection can be scheduled. A late or incomplete supplier submission does not just delay a part — it moves the FAI date, which is why supplier performance is a PM-level concern and not only a quality one.

04 Incoming control — matched to the class

Receiving activity is deliberately unequal across the classes, because uniform receiving inspection would waste effort on what is already assured and give false confidence on what inspection cannot confirm.

Class	Incoming control	Records retained
Special-process	Verify accreditation currency and the process record (e.g. cure cycle) for the lot; confirm operator certification; NDT evidence reviewed. The part is accepted on process evidence, not re-inspection of what the process created.	Accreditation cert, process/cure record, NDT scan record
Raw-material	Material certification reviewed against specification; incoming tests as required; out-time / freezer-control status confirmed on receipt and thereafter.	Material cert, incoming test record, out-time log
Hardware & standard	Certificate of conformity reviewed; dimensional/visual inspection by sampling against the standard.	C of C, receiving inspection record

All incoming records feed the same lot-level traceability chain the QMS maintains from raw material through to the finished panel — so that if a material lot is later found suspect, every panel built from it can be identified. Incoming control is the point where supplier traceability joins the program's own.

05 Performance monitoring — the quarterly PPAP cadence

Qualification is a point in time; performance is continuous. Supplier quality is monitored on a quarterly PPAP review cadence established as dependency D-04 (quarterly PPAP review) — a standing review of each supplier's quality data on an agreed schedule, so that a drift in a supplier's process is seen in the review, not discovered in a nonconformance.

Metric monitored	What it signals
PPAP re-submission cycles per supplier	How cleanly a supplier's submissions pass the first time — a rising cycle count is an early warning that a supplier's process or documentation discipline is slipping.
On-time, complete certification delivery	Whether supplier submissions arrive on the agreed schedule and complete — the exact failure mode I-05 exposed.
Incoming nonconformance rate	Whether qualified suppliers continue to deliver conforming material; a rise triggers reversion to tighter incoming control.
Special-process accreditation currency	That NADCAP and equivalent accreditations remain in force — a lapsed accreditation invalidates the basis on which that supplier's output is accepted at all.

The cadence itself has a dependency. The quarterly review only works if suppliers submit quality data on the agreed schedule — D-04 (quarterly PPAP review) on the RAIDD log records exactly that as a live dependency, tracked and owned. A monitoring cadence that assumes cooperation it hasn't secured is a plan on paper; naming the dependency is what makes it a plan in practice.

06 Supplier risk — and the incident the program already learned from

The plan carries the supplier risks the program is actively managing, and one nonconformance it has already absorbed. These are real entries on the RAIDD log, not hypotheticals.

Ref	Risk / issue	Handling
DEP-02	Supplier certifications gate First Article. Raw-material certs and PPAP submissions must be complete before FAI can be scheduled.	Tracked as a hard dependency with the Supplier Quality Engineer owning submission status; FAI scheduling is conditioned on it rather than assuming it.
R-03 / D-01	Production tooling qualification could slip, delaying the First Article Inspection date.	Carried as a medium/high dependency on the RAIDD log; tooling qualification treated as a gating supplier deliverable, not an internal-only task.
I-05	A raw-material lot's PPAP submission arrived incomplete — missing one dimensional report — delaying that lot's qualification.	The lesson: a submission gate has to check completeness, not just content. A PPAP package that is 95% present is not 95% qualified — it is not qualified. Incoming review now treats a missing required record as a stop, and the quarterly cadence tracks completeness as its own metric.

I-05 is why §05 monitors completeness as a distinct metric. The incident was not a bad part — the material may well have been fine. It was a documentation gap that stopped a lot from being qualified on schedule. That distinction matters: on a program where acceptance rests on records, an incomplete record is a nonconformance, even when the physical material conforms. Building that lesson back into the monitoring metric is how a one-time issue becomes a permanent control rather than a story in a lessons-learned log.

07 Purchase-order flow-down — what every supplier is contractually held to

Supplier control is only real if it is contractual. AS9100 §8.4 requires that the program's requirements be communicated to suppliers before they provide anything, so each purchase order for flight-hardware material or a special process flows down a defined set of obligations. These are not boilerplate — each one exists because its absence would open a specific gap.

Flowed-down requirement	Why it is on the purchase order
Specification & revision control	The supplier must build to the exact specification and revision the program qualified — a supplier working to a superseded revision produces conforming-looking material that does not match the current design.
Special-process accreditation	Where a special process is involved, current NADCAP (or equivalent) accreditation is a condition of the order, not a nice-to-have — it is the basis on which output that can't be inspection-verified is accepted at all.
Record retention & right of access	The supplier must retain process and quality records and grant the program (and its customer) the right to review them — because on a program where acceptance rests on records, a record the program cannot obtain is a record that does not exist.
Notification of change & nonconformance	The supplier must notify the program before changing a qualified process and must disclose escapes — a silent process change invalidates the qualification the program relied on without anyone knowing.
Right of surveillance	The program reserves the right to audit or witness the supplier's process, extending §8.4 control from paperwork to the floor where the special process actually happens.

Flow-down is how upstream control becomes enforceable. Everything §02 said about moving control upstream depends on these clauses being in the order before work starts. A qualification the supplier can walk away from, a record the program cannot demand, a process change the program never hears about — each turns supplier control back into a hope. The purchase order is where the plan stops describing control and starts requiring it.

08 How this plan sits in the suite

The Supplier Management Plan is the outward-facing half of the program's quality system. The Control Plan governs the characteristics Acme creates in-house; this plan governs the material and processes Acme buys, applying the same PPAP discipline to the supply base. It draws its dependencies and its one incident from the RAIDD log, implements §8.4 of the AS9100 Quality Management System, feeds the lot traceability that terminates at the First Article Inspection, and shares an owner (S. Pham) with the supplier-quality role named across the suite. Together they make the point that on a composite production program, quality is bought as much as it is built — and both halves have to be controlled to the same standard.