If you machine, treat, harness or sub-assemble parts for the primes clustered at Filton, the hardest part of the work is not the work. It is proving it. Every part you despatch has to carry an unbroken chain of evidence behind it: the raw-material certificate, the lot and serial numbers, the special-process records, the inspection results, all linkable on demand from goods-in to delivery. That traceability and standards burden is pushed down the chain from Airbus, GKN Aerospace and Rolls-Royce at the 100-hectare Filton Enterprise Area, and from Defence Equipment & Support at MOD Abbey Wood. For most of the Tier-2 and Tier-3 suppliers in South Gloucestershire, it is reconstructed by hand. This page is about the software that turns that reconstruction into a record you can run on demand.
The Traceability Burden the Primes Push Down the Chain
Filton is one of the densest aerospace and defence supply chains in Europe. The West of England Aerospace Forum, based at Temple Quay in Bristol, represents more than 250 aerospace, defence and advanced-manufacturing firms, and the primes here are fed by 150-plus regional SMEs: precision machine shops, NADCAP special-process houses, sub-assembly and wiring-harness firms. The primes have their own engineering teams; the suppliers, almost without exception, do not, and have no wish to.
What the primes do have is a compliance regime they enforce contractually all the way down. AS9100 is the entry ticket. NADCAP accreditation is mandatory for the special processes (heat treating, chemical processing, NDT, welding, coatings), and 50-plus major aerospace organisations, Airbus and Boeing among them, require it of their supply chain. AS9102 governs how every First Article Inspection is documented. None of that is optional, and none of it is something a 40-person machine shop can absorb with a spreadsheet for much longer.
From Raw-Material Cert to Despatch: One Record, Not Three Systems
The recurring pain is not that suppliers lack systems. It is that they run two that don’t talk. A typical firm has an MRP/ERP for jobs, stock and despatch, and a separate quality or QMS layer for inspection, certs and non-conformance. The traceability that the standard demands lives across both, plus the shop floor in between, so it never exists as a single continuous record until someone is asked for it.
UK aerospace SMEs lean hard on platforms like 123insight to get there (it is the MRP/ERP that firms such as Percival Aviation used as the framework for AS9100 and EASA accreditation, and that Platinum Precision Engineering uses for end-to-end materials-and-treatments traceability). Others run Epicor Kinetic, whose quality module covers AS9100 workflows including First Article Inspection, non-conformance and CAPA. These are capable systems. The gap is the joins around them:
- The material certificate captured at goods-in is not linked to the lot and serial numbers issued on the job, so tying a delivered part back to its raw stock is a manual hunt.
- Special-process records (the NADCAP-controlled steps subcontracted out or run in-house) sit in their own files rather than against the part record.
- Job travellers, inspection sign-offs and certificates of conformity are paper or re-keyed, so the ERP’s version of a job and what happened on the floor drift apart.
We build the integration and the data model that make those three a single thread: scan a part, see its cert, its serial history, its process records and its inspection results as one record, not three logins and a folder.
First Article Inspection, NADCAP and the Audit Fire Drill
First Article Inspection is where the disconnect bites hardest. Under AS9102, a FAIR is assembled across three forms (part-number, product and characteristic accountability, capturing serialization, materials and special processes), and a new FAI is triggered every time a design, process, tooling, material, supplier or location changes, or after a two-year production lapse. In practice that means re-assembling the report by hand from drawings, the ERP and spreadsheets, repeatedly. GKN Aerospace even publishes a common-mistakes guide for FAI because suppliers get it wrong so often.
The same hand-assembly haunts audit time. NADCAP and AS9100 demand controlled documents, CAPA and non-conformance tracking, and when those live in spreadsheets and shared drives, audit prep becomes a fire drill instead of a report. We build the layer that pulls characteristic data, serial numbers and process records straight from the systems that already hold them into the FAIR forms, and that keeps non-conformance and corrective-action records queryable, so a First Article or an auditor’s request is generated, not reconstructed.
Reporting Into Every Prime’s Portal Without Rekeying
Then there is the reporting the primes demand back. Delivery, quality and non-conformance data already lives in your ERP, and then has to be re-entered into each customer’s external system: Exostar SupplyLine (the aerospace and defence supply-chain platform with its CMMC and ITAR controls), GKN Aerospace’s own supplier portal, and per-customer scorecards. The same numbers, keyed two or three times, with no single internal view of how you are performing against each prime.
This is squarely API integration work: connect the source data once, push it out to each portal in the shape that portal expects, and surface your own delivery and quality performance against every customer on one dashboard. That is the view the external portals will never give you, because each only shows its own slice.
Software Built Around Your MRP, Quality System and the Shop Floor
The work here is not ripping out 123insight or Epicor and starting again. It is the custom software that makes your MRP, your quality system and your shop floor behave as one traceable whole:
- Integrations between MRP/ERP, the QMS and the prime portals so material, serial, process and inspection data flows once.
- A continuous traceability record linking raw-material cert to despatch, queryable in seconds at FAI or audit.
- Automated First Article and audit packs generated from live data instead of rebuilt by hand.
- A single supplier-performance dashboard spanning every prime you report into.
For an AS9100/NADCAP supplier without developers, carrying the prime’s traceability burden on two systems that don’t talk, an ongoing build-and-retain relationship beats a hire that is near-impossible to recruit here anyway.
Working Near Filton or Abbey Wood?
The fastest place to start is the seam that hurts most at audit: wherever a serial number, a material cert or a process record has to be hand-matched to a part, or a delivery figure re-keyed into a prime’s portal, there is a traceability gap and a rework cost to design out. Show us where data is being retyped or reconstructed between your systems and we’ll start with the traceability gap that hurts most at audit. Aerospace is one of three Bristol clusters we work in; the wider view is on the Bristol page.
