Does anyone have any experience with NADCAP?

We have a couple of our plants that have to be registered.

Thanks!

:bonk:

Not familiar with it myself, but here's their home:
http://www.pri.sae.org/Nadcap/

Hit post too quick. Since PRI now has NACLA recognization for its 17025 accreditation program, one may infer their audit process would be thourough and complete for a NADCAP audit.

Hi
i just found this site a few weeks back and i think it is a great way to communicate. To answer your question regarding Nadcap, I have about 10 years experience with Nadcap. I am the Quality Director for a Nondestructive Company which services the aerospace industry so we had to get our Nadcap certification back in 1991. Currently I have 8 of my labs which are located all over the country and hold the Nadcap certification. Prior to becoming nadcap certified you have to have your quality system audited and certified through either and AS 9100 audit or PRI can audit your system using an SAE 7004 audit. If you are interested in more information regarding nadcap certification call David DuBois at PRI (724) 772-1616 ext. 8136 or e-mail him at dubois(at)sae.org. Tell Dave I told you to call him.....

Let me know how it turned out and if you have any questions you can contact me...

:eek:

Larry - Welcome to the Cove and thanks for the great info and contact. I hope you will share some of your experience with us. The aerospace industry keeps popping up in automotive and I sometimes find it tough to get good information.

Dave

I have had several discussions with PRI about NADCAP registration for the Heat Treat Organization I work for. We currently have some aerospace customer that are telling us we have to get it by the end of this year because Boeing told them that. While our biggest Aerospace customer has said to this point they are not going to require it. I have an interesting article that I will attach about NADCAP.

Our sales that might be impacted by not getting NADCAP is about 1% - so the costs of registration and surveillance would not completely justify getting it. NOW if NADCAP automatically increased our sales then we would consider it, however everyone of our aerospace customers say that it would have no bearing on sales. Most of them as well would still want to come in and do a customer audit even with us getting NADCAP.

While NADCAP might not make sense for us; I in no way think negatively about it or speak negatively of it. It is what it is.
Food for thought.

Update...

Well We finially bit the bullet and got NADCAP registered in one of our facilities last January. It was a heck of a process and good experience...(I was forced to say that by my boss)...we did it in about 3 months which is kind of unheard of - but with our TS and CQI-9 systems we really didn't have to shore up to much to satisfy NADCAP. They are a bit old school with some things but it's all workable.

Actually it's helped us shore up our TS side a bit too; because I like to make the changes company-wide so they have far more reaching impact than just the one facility. With the advent of CQI-9 we are moving in the direction of controls like NADCAP anyway....nothing like the automotive world catching on after a bizillion years....:lol:

Update...

Well We finially bit the bullet and got NADCAP registered in one of our facilities last January. It was a heck of a process and good experience...(I was forced to say that by my boss)...we did it in about 3 months which is kind of unheard of - but with our TS and CQI-9 systems we really didn't have to shore up to much to satisfy NADCAP. They are a bit old school with some things but it's all workable.

Actually it's helped us shore up our TS side a bit too; because I like to make the changes company-wide so they have far more reaching impact than just the one facility. With the advent of CQI-9 we are moving in the direction of controls like NADCAP anyway....nothing like the automotive world catching on after a bizillion years....:lol:

Congratulations Tom!

Glad to hear that someone can get NADCAP so quick.
By the way, what findings, if any, did you have?

Thanks!

:agree1:

We had a total of 5 major findings and 10 minor findings...sounds like a lot but its about normal for NADCAP. 5 of the minor findings were in the quality system audit. They were mostly for items like procedures not addressing specific AMS specification requirements like double review by independent reviewers for process development and things like that. We did it and had evidence of it but the procedure did not say to do it.

The majors are anytime you do not do what the specification says; one was for not having a signature sheet to verify peoples signatures when they sign a form. You have to have the signatures on file to verify it was actually that person....things like that. Easy fixes.

What was nice about this was we went for NADCAP with urgency becasue a prime aerospace customer needed a NADCAP heat treater in the area. They helped us a bit with advice and we moved really quickly. It was either get this registration and get some business in there or close the plant....we chose to try one last thing to make it successfull and it seems to have worked so far...



FYI - we learned very quickly to black out any and all other documents and text when submitting the changes to documents. If you change one paragraph in a 10 page doc; they will read the whole thing and come back with more questions and possibly findings....so we went Pentagon on them and blacked everything out except the exact change.:lmao:

Does anyone have any experience with NADCAP?

We have a couple of our plants that have to be registered.

Thanks!

:bonk:

Used to be a person on here called andyG or something he/she was suppose to be a NADCAP expert used to work for PRI. You might want to try and PM them.

later,
quality-misfit

Is this what NADCAP is short for? (please excuse my ignorance.)
NADCAP - National Aerospace and Defense Contractors Accreditation Program (no longer used; Performance Review Institute and Society of Automotive Engineers)

To all those who wish to learn about Nadcap,I have been involved with over 85 audits for chemical processing and quality systems. I have been a private consultant in the metal finishing industry for over 5 years. I have over 30 years in the plating field. If you are interested in becoming Nadcap certified or you just need help or training in the metal finishing field please contact me.
Thank You
Robert Kuklenski
Chemical Processing Services

To all those who wish to learn about Nadcap,I have been involved with over 85 audits for chemical processing and quality systems. I have been a private consultant in the metal finishing industry for over 5 years. I have over 30 years in the plating field. If you are interested in becoming Nadcap certified or you just need help or training in the metal finishing field please contact me.
Thank You
Robert Kuklenski
Chemical Processing ServicesWith all that experience in the plating business and metal finishing, we'll be looking forward to you demonstrating that expertise in answering questions our Covers have about various aspects of metal finishing.

Such FREE advice here in the Cove will help establish your credentials as a credible expert whom people might want to use in paying for advice in such matters. Perhaps You might want to do a search on plating or metal finishing and see if there are some old threads to which you can contribute some expertise. The info you add may not help the original poster asking a question, but will be helpful to others who come across your tidbit when researching a similar situation.

The essence of a public Forum like the Cove is that everything is really on a quid pro quo basis:
Experts "spread their bread upon the waters" by helping out with some answers and, in turn, they get to demonstrate their expertise. Without such contributions to the general pool of free knowledge here, most folks just consider a guy who pops in to say he's available for private consultation as a mooch looking for free advertising.

PM me if you want but I recomend posting here -how else can every one learn or at least relate to your questions or experiance in going thru this.
I have been on both sides of the fence and liked asking the questions a whole lot more than answereing staff engineer questions. Would not concider myself an expert by any means but I do learn from my mistakes and have made enough of them over the years to have learned quite a bit. Nadcap is not as bad as some make out as long as you drop the "this is the way we have always done it" and engauge the pri staff with questions and clarifications before the auditor is on site.
Look forward to your posts.

Is this what NADCAP is short for? (please excuse my ignorance.)
NADCAP - National Aerospace and Defense Contractors Accreditation Program (no longer used; Performance Review Institute and Society of Automotive Engineers)

Yes it is what the acronym stands for...

Nadcap
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Nadcap (formerly NADCAP, the National Aerospace and Defense Contractors Accreditation Program) is a global cooperative standards-setting program for aerospace engineering, defense and related industries.

The acronym went away a couple of years ago just now known as Nadcap, Madcap and #%## these days.
It is a program administered by PRI an non profit entity under SAE.
Primes such as AirBus, Boeing, Goodrich, and others now use this program to address the approval of suppliers performing special processing for them.
While in the begining there were actual standards created for the audits these have gone away you you just now have the checklists themselves.
These are the compilation of what the primes want to have verified. Some of the discussion on what some though were important vrs what others thought was very "intresting". Still lots of discussion on getting out of the "raising the bar" actions and removing these types of questions from the checklists. The dirrective is to all the task groups to make it so but some are slower than others.

You have the base checklist and some sub checklists and depending on the process you can have suplemental checklists that ask questions specific releating to requirements of one of the primes. Most of the auditors have no love for these suplemental checklists and I think that the individual primes should have to deal with them on their own but that is a battle for those above my pay grade. I do not have to deal with them at my location since except for corprate desires and the vauge flowdown in the AirBus Gress program there is no contractual requirement.
We do find that we do get a benifit from haveing a knowldgeable auditor come in and look under the rocks to keep us on our toes. Just human nature to "drift". We get more out of these audits then the AS9100 we go thru.