Most complaints follow the workflow as drawn. A few carry more risk or more parties, and they need more from the first hour. Decide on day one whether a complaint is one of these, and say so on the log.
| Situation | What changes | Who else is involved |
|---|---|---|
| A safety, key or flight-critical characteristic | Escalate the same day under your escalation criteria (AQL-B13). Containment reaches every lot that could carry the defect, not only the suspect window you would normally use. The customer's own reporting requirements, which may run to hours, set the pace. | Senior management; the customer's quality and engineering contacts; anyone your contract names |
| Product found at the customer's customer or in service | Ask the customer what their customer needs from you and by when. Your containment and records must support their investigation, often with serial-level traceability. | The customer, who usually speaks to their customer |
| Suspected counterfeit or unapproved material | Quarantine the product and the paperwork; do not return or scrap anything until the investigation decides. Follow your counterfeit parts procedure (8.1.4) and your customer's reporting requirements. | Purchasing, your counterfeit parts owner, the customer |
| The cause sits at a supplier | The complaint stays yours: you answer the customer. Issue a corrective action request to the supplier (AQL-B01) and put their response inside yours, with your own escape cause at receiving. | Supplier quality; purchasing |
| A repeat of an earlier complaint | Reopen or link the earlier corrective action and say so in the response. The customer will check whether you noticed. A repeat is a corrective action that did not work, and it gets an 8D. | The owner of the earlier action |
| A finding at the customer's audit or source inspection | Treat it as a complaint on the log with the customer's response format and dates, and answer it like any other: cause, escape, actions, proof. | Whoever hosted the audit |
| Commercial content: a charge-back, cost claim or contract question | Split it out on day one. The quality response covers facts, causes and actions only; the commercial part goes to its owner. | The general manager or contract owner |
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A management aid, not certification or a registrar audit. Using it does not by itself show conformity to AS9100D or any other standard, and your customers' requirements may add to it.
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.
Aegis Insights are our own guidance, labeled wherever they appear: how we approach this work, not a requirement of any standard or customer.