Why do I need Nadcap for my heat-treating processes?

As a program, the goal of Nadcap is to promote quality. Nadcap certification is an important way of communicating to your customers that you excel at manufacturing products that meet or exceed the high quality standards established for the aerospace and defense industries.

In this post I will talk about Nadcap accreditation, providing detailed reasons for doing so. You may also find helpful the article on how to become a NADCAP approved supplier.

Nadcap: 4 good reasons to acquire the accreditation

1. Quality of product and service are considered to be as important as the customer relationship and price competitiveness. Accreditation from Nadcap provides yet another way to show your clients that your standards and processes are top of the line.
2. Nadcap is considered a systematic approach of checkpoints that confirm proven control and repeatability of a given process for which approval is being sought. There are many heat-treating processes for which Nadcap accreditation may be sought. Normally speaking, most heat treating companies will seek acceptances that relate specifically to their actual processes for aerospace.
3. The Nadcap accreditation process is meant to ensure those utilizing special processes and heat treating parts for the aerospace sector comply with consistent, high-quality standards for aerospace products.
4. By focusing on maintaining international quality standards, the safety of all who utilize these final aerospace products is ensured, and for companies, it will help to continually enhance and refine their heat treatment processes. In turn, this allows them to provide all of their customers with the best product quality possible.

For the aerospace industry, quality has long been a key procurement consideration. For many manufacturing primes, the path to excellence increasingly runs through special processes such as heat-treating, coatings, and materials testing. That’s because original equipment manufacturers (OEM) can often trace the cause of a flawed component back to a special process in a supplier’s shop, and restricting that possibility helps with risk management.

What is the hearth of Nadcap program?

Nadcap represents an unprecedented, co-operative industry effort to improve quality while reducing costs throughout the aerospace and defense industries. It is an approach to conformity assessment that brings together technical experts from all over the world to establish requirements for accreditation, approving suppliers, and defining operational program requirements.

It promotes a standardized approach to quality assurance and a reduction in redundant auditing throughout the aerospace industry. Nadcap audits check that work is done in conformance with customer requirements. The audits are in essence very simple. Auditors check what the customer asked for, what the operators were told to do and what was actually done. Nadcap enforces knowledge and understanding of the rules by simply identifying where the practices differed from the requirements.

Better control of the processes, which is at the heart of the Nadcap program, has allowed both the removal of some requirements and the tightening of others. The end result is that heat-treatment operations for aerospace are better managed, better controlled and are delivering fewer defective parts.

Nadcap accreditation provides added value for companies. Let’s see some additional benefits.

What added value does Nadcap certification provide?

A Nadcap accreditation is seen as the “gold standard” in aerospace heat treatment. The Nadcap assessment is a proactive measure for companies that benefits their customers by guaranteeing proficiency and centralizing risk management with accredited suppliers.

The Nadcap program is designed to provide a cost-effective consensus approach to special process and product control. Among other assurances, NADCAP certification:

• Guarantees solid industry standards;
• Improves product quality;
• Boosts customer satisfaction;
• Ensures the implementation of best practices;
• Lowers prices through improved standardization;
• Results in fewer audits.

Why implementation of Nadcap standards should not scare you

Nadcap is viewed by many accredited suppliers as the most difficult accreditation to achieve. This may be seen as a downside of Nadcap; however as a supplier in an industry where quality is so crucial, and where mistakes can cost lives, achieving such a stringent accreditation in fact makes a company much more competitive against other suppliers which are not accredited.

Nadcap’s evolving purpose is to create a supply chain that follows industry best practices, identified requirements, documentation, systems that foster continuous improvement, recording of process, inspection standards, required testing, and record specific variables of a given process which all lead to a more repeatable processes.

Joining the Nadcap program is an essential requirement for working in the aerospace sector. That is something to be proud of, and gives a competitive edge against suppliers from other countries who undercut the market through reduced prices.

So, are you ready to challenge the market in an open and transparent way?