I am the Contract Review Specialist at a seals and bearings manufacturing facility. We are AS9100D certified. Many of our seals and bearings are for the aerospace, defense and aviation industries. I'm fairly new to this position, and having a hard time deciding on the best way to handle exceptions to customer's specifications and requirements. This would be specific to our Customer Service Department. Currently, after the contract review & after entering the customer order, the Customer Service Representatives would note any exceptions to customer requirements and/or specifications within the body of the email when they are acknowledging the order. This would be in cases where the exception would not have an impact on the form, fit or function of the part we're making. For example, we do not perform any special processes at our facility, so we take exception to NADCAP. Section 8.2.3.1 of AS9100D states: "If upon review the organization determines that some customer requirements cannot be met or can only partially be met, the organization shall negotiate a mutually acceptable requirement with the customer. The organization shall ensure that contract or order requirements differing from those previously defined are resolved." What we DON'T want to do is set every order aside and wait days or weeks to hear back from the customer while we negotiate a mutually acceptable requirement. This wouldn't be so bad if we were a small facility or machine shop, but we currently make over 17,000 active parts, so you can imagine the volume we're dealing with. Each Customer Service Rep. is inundated with orders, complaints, quote requests, follow-ups, etc. every day, and this extra layer is only adding to their chaos. We only have 7 Customer Service Reps to handle all of this--and there is no cooperation from corporate to add any more bodies to this department. I'm working with the Customer Service Manager to try to come up with a feasible way to handle exceptions, but still get the orders processed in a timely manner. Our manufacturing process for the carbon (that we make and then machine the seals and bearings from) is a lengthy process and our customers do not want their orders delayed. How is everyone else handling this? Does anyone have any suggestions?