Most aerospace machine shops do not have a configuration management problem in the sense a prime contractor means it. They build to the customer's drawing and do not own the design. What they have is a change problem: the customer's definition of the part changes, and the shop's own documents, programs and plans do not all change with it, or not at the same time. The patterns repeat from shop to shop:
- The change arrives in an inbox. A new drawing revision comes by email or a portal notice to whoever is on the distribution list. Nobody logs it, so nobody owns it.
- The drawing is filed and the change is called done. The program, the CMM program, the inspection plan, the setup sheet and the router are updated by whoever remembers, if they remember.
- Old programs live in machine memory. The network folder has rev 7; the control on Mill 2 still holds rev 6, because that is faster to call up.
- Printed copies multiply. Characteristic lists, setup sheets and drawings get printed for the cell binder and never come back.
- Specifications change quietly. A customer revises a finish or material specification without touching any drawing, and the purchase orders keep calling the old revision.
- Process changes are improvements, so nobody calls them changes. A toolpath rewritten to save four minutes, a job moved to a newer machine: no assessment, no customer notice, no FAI decision.
- Nobody can say which lot was the first at the new revision. The change history says what changed, not which product it reached.
Each of these ends in the same NCR: made to superseded revision. The parts are often beautiful. They are also scrap, or a concession request, or an escape. None of it is solved by a better form. It is solved by deciding who owns the line between a change arriving and the last old copy leaving the floor, and by checking at the machine that it happened.
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Clause numbers refer to AS9100D (SAE AS9100 Rev D) unless another document is named. The standards' text is not reproduced here: use your own licensed copy.
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