OEE Software for AS9100: What Aerospace Manufacturers Need from Production Monitoring

AS9100 Rev D is the aerospace industry's quality management system standard, building on ISO 9001:2015 with additional requirements for risk management, product safety, and operational integrity. For aerospace manufacturers, OEE software must satisfy both ISO 9001 base requirements and AS9100-specific additions.

See our roundup of production monitoring systems used in this space.

AS9100 Requirements That Directly Implicate OEE Software

• Clause 8.5.1 (Control of production): Controlled conditions for production including monitoring and measurement at appropriate stages
• Clause 8.5.1 g: Specific requirement for infrastructure, process environment, and work instructions, OEE monitoring supports evidence that production environment is controlled
• Clause 10.2 (Nonconformity and corrective action): OEE quality rate data feeds NCR investigations for production escapes
• Product safety emphasis: AS9100 adds explicit product safety management requirements, OEE data contributes to demonstrating that equipment producing safety-critical parts is operating within validated parameters

First Article Inspection (FAI), the formal verification that production processes produce conforming parts, is a fundamental AS9100 compliance activity. OEE software contributes to FAI in two ways:

• Process stability evidence: OEE performance and quality rate data during production runs demonstrates process stability, a requirement for successful FAI
• Equipment qualification linkage: OEE data from the FAI production run should be archived with the FAI documentation, providing evidence that the process was operating normally when the first article was produced

Calibration and OEE Traceability for Aerospace

AS9100 requires measurement and test equipment calibration traceability to national standards. When calibration runs as recurring tasks in a CMMS that shares a platform with OEE, a quality engineer can look up the calibration history of each measurement system for the production period an auditor asks about.

Aerospace manufacturers selecting OEE software for AS9100 compliance should verify:

• Production traceability: OEE data records linked to production part numbers, lot numbers, or work order numbers, enabling traceability from part to production conditions
• Measurement system calibration integration: CMMS calibration records for OEE measurement equipment linkable to production periods
• Audit trail integrity: Immutable OEE data records with complete change history, NADCAP and AS9100 auditors examine this specifically
• Long-term data retention: Aerospace products have service lives of 20-50 years, OEE data retention strategy should align with product records retention requirements
• AS9100 / NADCAP reference customers: Verified aerospace manufacturer reference customers who have used the platform in AS9100 or NADCAP assessments