Digital aerospace APQP/PPAP — this used to take a whole team weeks; now iLEAN does it.

The problem

The APQP lives in 47 spreadsheets and a senior engineer writes the PPAP run-at-rate by hand.

The quality manager at an aero tier-1/tier-2 always describes it the same way: “we have the APQP, but it's in five folders and nobody dares touch the master version”. Every design change forces the DFMEA, PFMEA, control plan, measurement plan and capability dossier to be reopened. And every PPAP run-at-rate is a month of a three-person team reconciling what the MES says, what the CMM says and what SAP says.

1. The APQP is not alive — it is frozen in the version that was delivered. The process has drifted, but the dossier says otherwise.
2. The PPAP is not generated, it is written up — an engineer copies data from the CMM into the AS9102, checks the furnace logs, hunts for the raw-material cert in the supplier's folder.
3. Multi-OEM multiplies the work — Boeing asks for one format, Airbus another, Safran another, and there is only one plant process. Three dossiers, three teams.

The customer does not accept NPI delays; nor can the quality team grow without limit. The bottleneck is real, and it shows on every milestone date: the technical engineering was finished weeks ago — what's missing is the paperwork.

How it fits the IRIS system

iLEAN does not add another PLM — it seals the cracks between the MES, the CMM and the AS9102.

The APQP/PPAP problem is not a lack of data: the plant generates it every day. The problem is that it lives in islands — MES, CMM, furnace SCADA, supplier certs, control plan in a spreadsheet, the OEM's AS9102 template — and nobody has time to join them in the format each customer demands. iLEAN acts as the putty that fills those gaps: we don't ask you to change PLM or MES.

Tracer records every batch, every parameter, every measurement. Writer compiles the AS9102 and the APQP dossier by phase. The agent detects deviations — if the control plan says one thing and the CMM says another, it opens the incident before the PPAP.

The three iLEAN pieces applied to aero APQP/PPAP:

• iLEAN Tracer (Connect + Edge) — continuously captures the data the AS9102 needs: raw-material traceability (batch, heat lot, cert), process parameters (furnace cure curve, machining speeds, coating bath), CMM dimensional data. If the machine has an API, it connects; if not, it reads from the local PC; if there is only an analog panel, photo and OCR.
• iLEAN Writer — compiles the documentation package in the OEM's format. AS9102 forms 1/2/3 for FAI. APQP dossier by phase (DFMEA, PFMEA, control plan, measurement plan, capability, run-at-rate). Supports Boeing D6-51991, Airbus 9000, Rolls-Royce SABRe, Safran and GE Aviation templates. One source of truth, several output formats.
• iLEAN Agent — keeps the APQP alive: if a real process parameter deviates from what the control plan says, it opens the incident and proposes the update to the quality engineer. Without waiting for the run-at-rate. The person validates and signs; the system never updates on its own the dossier the customer is going to audit.

See the full IRIS architecture →

Before and after

Manual APQP/PPAP vs. live APQP/PPAP with iLEAN

Aspect	Manual APQP/PPAP	With iLEAN Tracer + Writer + Agent
APQP status between reviews	Frozen in the last delivered version	Live — reflects the real process at all times
Generating the AS9102 FAI	Senior engineer, days of copy-paste	Writer compiles from the CMM and traceability
PPAP run-at-rate	Weeks of a three-person team	Dossier generated from the actual run
Multi-OEM (Boeing/Airbus/RR/Safran)	Three separate dossiers, three teams	One source of truth, several output templates
Detecting process-vs-plan deviation	At the next run-at-rate, weeks later	When it happens, on the line, with an incident opened
Surprise OEM audit	Weekend sprint by the quality team	The dossier is already live and available

Impact estimate

Impact estimate for your plant — to be validated with your numbers.

The block below is an estimate to be validated with the specific data of your program. We put it forward so the committee has an order of magnitude; we refine it during the diagnostic.

• Tier-1/tier-2 with 2-4 active NPI programs and between 2 and 4 OEMs as end customers.
• Writer pilot on one specific program — automatic generation of AS9102 forms 1/2/3 from the CMM and the raw-material cert. First value within a few weeks: a complete FAI generated by the agent in hours, not days.
• Indicative payback between 4 and 9 months, depending on the number of PPAP run-at-rates per year and the current size of the documentation team.
• Documentation-work reduction ≥30% once Tracer is integrated with MES and CMM. The hard lever: freeing the senior engineer from copy-paste so they do real technical analysis (capability, root cause, process improvement).

And the quality director's reasonable doubt

“What if the AI puts a wrong figure in an AS9102 that I sign?” — hallucination is a problem of free generation, not of anchored tasks. Compiling an AS9102 is exactly what AI does best: taking a piece of data from one system (CMM, MES, cert) and putting it into another format (the OEM template). In anchored tasks, the best models brought error below 1.5% ^[1]. And even so, what is critical is never signed alone: iLEAN composes the dossier, the quality engineer signs. The three safety rings exist precisely for this.

^[1] OpenAI paper “Why Language Models Hallucinate”, 2025 — on the reliability of AI in anchored tasks.