AS9100 with AI — the audit stops being a three-month sprint and becomes living evidence.

The problem

The AS9100 audit is prepared in a sprint — and between sprints the evidence goes stale.

An AS9100-certified aerospace plant lives with a double cycle: the manufacturing cycle (every part, every batch, every First Article) and the audit cycle (internal, customer, OEM, certification body). When the annual surveillance audit or the three-yearly recertification comes round, the quality team goes into war mode for weeks: rebuilding traceability for the audited parts, completing the AS9102 forms that were left half done, cleaning up the non-conformity list, preparing the evidence package for the auditor.

The problem is not competence. It is structural: the information an AS9100 audit needs lives spread across the ERP, the MES, the CMM, the inspection sheets, the training records, configuration management and, above all, the knowledge of the people who carry the parts in their heads. Between audits that information keeps being generated, but it never gets stitched together. On the auditor's day, the plant has three options: spend two months rebuilding it, accept findings for incomplete evidence, or both at once.

How it fits the IRIS system

iLEAN does not replace your quality system — it stitches together the evidence you already have, continuously.

The AS9100 problem is not a lack of information: it is information living on islands that only reaches the audit dossier once it has been rebuilt by hand. iLEAN acts as the putty between the ERP, the MES, the CMM, the personnel records and the OASIS database, without asking you to change any of your systems. The evidence is assembled alongside manufacturing, not afterwards.

Tracer stitches the traceability. Writer assembles the FAI and the audit dossier. The person — the quality manager — signs. The audit becomes continuous.

The three iLEAN pieces applied to AS9100:

• Tracer — captures every event relevant to AS9100 whether it comes from the ERP (a work order being opened), from the MES (an approved configuration change), from the CMM (an inspection result on a critical characteristic), from document management (a procedure revision) or from the training records (an inspector's qualification renewed). Connect feeds Tracer with everything that enters the plant — even the OEM email carrying an approved deviation.
• Writer — automates the First Article Inspection under AS9102: it reads the drawing and the CAD model, extracts the characteristics (with their tolerances and notes), collects the actual CMM measurements and assembles Form 1, Form 2 and Form 3 ready for review. The quality lead signs — the FAI never closes on its own.
• Agent — checks consistency between the Quality Manual, the AS9100 procedures, the corrective actions in OASIS and operational reality. It warns when an inspector's qualification is about to expire, when a corrective action has not been verified, when a recurring non-conformity points to a root cause nobody has tackled. It does not execute — it proposes; the person decides and signs.

See the full IRIS architecture →

Before and after

AS9100 with a sprint vs. with iLEAN Tracer + Writer + Agent

Aspect	Preparation sprint per audit	With iLEAN — living evidence
Part traceability	Rebuilt by hand for the auditor	Stitched continuously from ERP/MES/CMM
First Article Inspection (AS9102)	Forms by hand, weeks per new part	Automatic draft from drawing + CMM
Configuration management	Excel + occasional human review	Change detected and linked to the affected part
Corrective actions (OASIS)	A folder on the quality lead's desk	Live status, alert if it is not verified
Inspector qualifications	A list in HR, reviewed manually	Alert before expiry
Preparing the auditor's dossier	10-12 weeks of sprint	Generated in hours from live data

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 plant. We put it forward so the committee has an order of magnitude; we refine it during the diagnostic.

• AS9100D-certified aerospace plant, Tier 1 or Tier 2, vertical aero ERP or SAP, heterogeneous MES and CMM, internal quality team plus external auditor.
• Tracer + Writer pilot focused on (a) FAI automation for the part family with the most first articles per year and (b) stitching traceability for one critical product line. First value expected within a few weeks.
• Indicative payback between 4 and 9 months, depending on what the audit sprint costs you today and on the average cost of the incomplete-evidence findings from your last audit.
• Expected reduction of evidence-related findings and of audit preparation hours of more than 30% (conservative estimate).

And the quality manager's reasonable doubt

“What if the AI drafts a FAI badly and a Form 3 slips through with the wrong value?” — hallucination is a problem of free generation, not of anchored tasks. Assembling a FAI is exactly an anchored task: read the drawing, collect the CMM measurement, format it per AS9102. In this kind of task, the best models brought error below 1.5% ^[1]. And the human signature is mandatory: Writer proposes, the quality lead signs. No FAI closes without that signature, and iLEAN's three safety rings guarantee that nothing with full autonomy ever enters the critical systems.

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