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Compliance & Regulation

AS9100 Aerospace Standard

Term 41 of 68 in the ERPStack technical glossary

What is AS9100 Aerospace Standard?

AS9100 is a widely adopted and standardized quality management system (QMS) for the aerospace industry, incorporating ISO 9001 requirements alongside aerospace-specific quality and safety criteria.

AS9100 Aerospace Standard at a glance

Basis
The ISO 9001 quality management system plus aviation, space and defence requirements
Software implication
Traceability from 1 delivered serial number back through its parts, revisions and inspections
Records
Append-only history with 0 in-place edits, so a build from 10 years ago still reconstructs
Key artefacts
3 recurring ones: Bill of Materials revisions, nonconformance records, first-article results
Certification
Awarded to an organisation by an accredited body — ERPStack holds 0 certifications
Built with
Traceability tables in PostgreSQL 18 through Drizzle ORM 0.45, surfaced in a Next.js 16 and React 19 ERP, revisions sealed to AWS WORM storage, approvals gated by RBAC and SSO
Numbers that matter
1 serial number traced to N part lots; ISO 9001 as the base; 0 in-place edits to quality records; 3 artefacts an auditor samples first
Adjacent standards
ISO 27001 for information security, and FDA 21 CFR Part 11 Compliance in regulated production
Commonly paired with
Bill of Materials revisions, an ERP work order, WORM storage and RBAC approvals
Sectors that require it
aerospace primes and the manufacturing and logistics suppliers feeding them, with ISO 27001 and FDA 21 CFR Part 11 Compliance adjacent in defence and regulated production.

How AS9100 Aerospace Standard works in production

AS9100 certification requires complete material traceability throughout the manufacturing process. ERP systems must document raw material sources, processing logs, testing certificates, and inspection results, associating them with finished components.

The ERPStack approach to AS9100 Aerospace Standard

We develop aerospace ERP modules with built-in AS9100 compliance logging, tracking every material change and inspection event in immutable database tables.

Frequently asked questions about AS9100 Aerospace Standard

What does the AS9100 Aerospace Standard add to ISO 9001?

Sector requirements on top of a general quality management system. The Aerospace Standard extends ISO 9001 with expectations specific to aviation, space and defence — configuration management, counterfeit part prevention, first-article inspection and risk management. For software the practical consequence is traceability: the system must connect a delivered unit to the parts, revisions and inspections that produced it.

Why does traceability drive the data model?

Because the Aerospace Standard asks questions backwards in time. Given a serial number, which lot did each component come from, which Bill of Materials revision applied, and who signed the inspection? Answering that requires immutable records with effective dates rather than tables updated in place, and it is nearly impossible to add later because the history you would need was never written.

What breaks when quality records live in documents?

Retrieval, mostly. An Aerospace Standard audit samples specific units and asks for their evidence, and a folder of spreadsheets and scanned forms turns each sample into hours of searching. Structured records in the ERP make the same request a query. The information is identical; what changes is whether producing it costs minutes or days, and whether gaps are visible before an auditor finds them.

Can a software vendor certify you to AS9100?

No. The Aerospace Standard is awarded to an organisation by an accredited certification body after auditing its quality management system. ERPStack holds no such certification and does not confer one. What software can do is make the required traceability, nonconformance handling and record retention native to daily operations, so the audit examines a working system rather than a reconstruction.

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