An Investigation on the Engineering Process Oriented Approach to Aerospace Quality Assurance Compliance in Manufacturing SMEs

Aerospace Manufacturing SMEs are continuously facing the challenge of complying with the aerospace quality standard requirements. Some of these requirements can be quite demanding for manufacturing SMEs compared to the big organisations with dedicated resources to maintain the organisations quality systems. The engineering process oriented approach proposed in this paper is considered to be essential for developing aerospace manufacturing quality management systems. It aims primarily to increase effectiveness and efficiency of manufacturing SMEs in achieving their business objectives. The approach is much more comprehensive than just involving manufacturing activities, which includes identifying all the resources required by processes, inputs, activities and outputs, in the context of aerospace quality assurance and compliance. Furthermore, this paper will investigate the implementation perspectives of the approach particularly against the aerospace quality assurance requirement in manufacturing SMEs. An application case study on a manufacturing SME is presented, which helps further evaluate and validate the approach through quality assurance compliance application.