The aerospace industry continues to expand year on year.

As a sector that has planned for the long-term, with production cycles spanning decades, the industry needs to be more agile than ever as a result of disruptors such as the impact of COVID-19, cyber-attacks, increased digitization, and seismic political events.

As a result, aerospace organizations need to ensure they are resilient and forward-thinking. Costs must be sustainably reduced without compromising on safety, and supply chains need to be more responsive. The ability to produce safe and quality products, whilst protecting your people and the environment remains at the heart of this.

Let’s explore how to increase resilience within your aerospace organization, face these challenges, and thrive.

What is organizational resilience?

According to BS 65000:2022 (essential reading for guidance on organizational resilience), organizational resilience is the ability of an organization to anticipate, prepare for, respond and adapt to incremental change and sudden disruptions in order to survive and prosper.

BSI’s model for Organizational Resilience can be distilled into three fundamental elements: product excellence, process reliability and people behaviours:

• Product excellence – no matter where you are along the supply chain, do your products /services meet market requirements and customer needs? Do they comply with the relevant market regulations? To be truly resilient and ensure customer satisfaction you need to be agile, continually innovate, and differentiate your offering.

• Process Reliability – Consistent, reliable, and robust processes are crucial for an aerospace organization to remain resilient. Business-critical processes in areas such as quality, health and safety, environmental management, business continuity management, and information security must be robust and compliant both within the organization and throughout its supply chain.

• People Behaviours – Aerospace organizations must manage interactions with customers and supply chain partners on ethical and social responsibility issues and when managed well there’s a positive effect on the brand’s reputation. People must be trained and have the right skills. Employees must understand the needs of the client, be motivated to make continual improvements, and innovation encouraged. This helps keep morale, wellbeing, and retention high.

We work with organizations around the globe to help them become more resilient by embedding habits of excellence in each of these three elements. Download our pocket guide to learn more about organizational resilience.

Improve aerospace operational resilience

With increasingly complex supply chains that span the world, it’s important that you can demonstrate your commitment to quality and on-time delivery.

Implementing globally recognized standards will help mitigate the risks of failure in the supply chain, boost customer satisfaction and make your organization resilient. The world’s most widely adopted quality management standard is BS EN ISO 9001, used by organizations from all sectors and of all sizes to boost customer satisfaction.

Most major aerospace manufacturers and suppliers worldwide require certification to the BS EN ISO 9000 series as a condition of doing business with them, and organizations that achieve certification will be listed on the Online Aerospace Supplier Information System (OASIS) database.

Based on BS EN ISO 9001 there are three main standards in the series, each one relevant to organizations delivering certain activities:

• BS EN 9100:2018 Quality management systems – Requirements for aviation, space and defence organizations. This is covers activities including, design, development and manufacture. It can also cover repair but only of an organization’s own product.

• BS EN 9110:2018 Quality management systems – Requirements for aviation maintenance organizations. This covers MRO activities of whole aircraft, components, and systems.

• BS EN 9120:2018 Quality management systems – Requirements for aviation, space and defence distributors. This has been developed to apply to stockists and distributors of aerospace and/or defence parts.

Improve aerospace information resilience

With new technologies and trends such as the Internet of Things (IoT), increased connectivity, and the predicted growth in the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), safeguarding information is crucial.

A resilient aerospace organization needs to manage its information— physical, digital and intellectual property—throughout its lifecycle; from source to destruction. By adopting information-security-minded practices, your staff and stakeholders are still able to gather, store or access the information they need securely and effectively. You also need to protect your security infrastructure. These standards can help you achieve that:

• BS EN ISO/IEC 27001 - an excellent framework to help organizations manage and protect information assets so they remain safe and secure. BS EN ISO/IEC 27001 helps organizations continually review and refine how this is done, not only for today but also for the future.

• BS EN ISO/IEC 27017 - extending many of the controls established and implemented with BS EN ISO/IEC 27001 as well as some additional ones, BS EN ISO/IEC 27017 protects the information stored and/or shared via cloud-based services.

• BS ISO/IEC 20000 series - IT services need to be cost-effective, reliable, consistent and efficient. This balance can be achieved with BS ISO/IEC 20000 series whether IT service management is internal or outsourced. It brings organizations up to ITIL standards so that IT services deliver exactly what’s needed.

Contact BSI today to find out how our services can help build supply chain resilience within your organization.

Discover BSI Knowledge

As challenges and disruptions continue to arise, having instant access to the latest aerospace best practices is crucial for ensuring your resilience to them. Our tailored BSI Knowledge subscription service provides flexibility, access, visibility, and control over the standards and insights your team needs to overcome issues, such as supply chain instability. Build your own collection and keep updated with any relevant changes to your standards strategy. Request to learn more.