From As-Designed to As-Serviced: Why Traceability Is Your AS9100 Quality Program

Ask an auditor what they want to see in an AS9100D audit, a customer source inspection, or a DCMA review and the answer is rarely complicated. They want the story of one part, told in full. Where the material came from. What was designed. What was built. What happened to it after it left the floor.

Most manufacturers can answer parts of that question quickly. Almost none can answer all of it without pulling from three systems and at least one spreadsheet someone maintains by hand.

The Question Every Auditor Asks

That gap is where a lot of quality programs quietly live or die. Pass and fail tracking, the kind most horizontal ERP systems are built around, tells you whether something met spec at one point in time. It doesn’t tell you the full chain of custody a part traveled through, and in this industry, that chain is the whole point.

Three States, One Part

As designed, as built, as serviced. Three states of the same part, and A&D manufacturers are expected to move between them on demand. As designed lives in engineering, tied to a specific revision and change order. As built lives on the shop floor, tied to the actual materials, operators, and inspections that touched that specific unit. As serviced lives wherever field service and MRO data ends up, which for a lot of manufacturers is nowhere close to the other two.

Where the System Breaks Down

When those three don’t talk to each other, you get the problems that show up in FAI and FRACAS reviews. A part fails in the field, and reconstructing what happened to it takes days instead of minutes, because nobody built the system to connect those dots automatically. Counterfeit parts prevention gets harder too. If supply chain visibility stops at your own floor, you’re trusting tier-two and tier-three suppliers to catch problems your own systems can’t see. Layer CMMC 2.0 flowdown requirements on top of that, and a traceability gap stops being just a quality problem. It becomes a contract compliance risk.

Why Generic AI Makes This Worse

This is also where generic AI runs into a wall. An AI recommendation engine that doesn’t know the difference between a configured product and a standard one will recommend the wrong service part, and now there’s a frustrated customer and a delayed repair on top of the traceability gap. The AI isn’t the problem. The data model underneath it is. In a business built on configured and engineer-to-order parts, that data model isn’t a back-office detail, it’s the product. That skepticism runs deeper than bad recommendations, too. A lot of A&D companies are, rightly, wary of turning any AI loose on export-controlled technical data or CUI, especially with DoD now moving to fold AI security requirements into CMMC under the FY2026 NDAA. The question isn’t whether AI is useful. It’s whether it’s operating inside your existing security boundary or shipping your data to someone else’s.

Infor CloudSuite Industrial is FedRAMP Moderate authorized, CMMC Level 2 ready, and listed on the FedRAMP Marketplace, and it’s already built to support DCAA-compliant accounting, AS9100 quality processes, DFARS, NIST 800-171, and ITAR requirements. That authorization covers the ERP itself, and Infor is working on getting certification for its industry-leading AI solution (Velocity Suite).

The Fix Isn’t a Spreadsheet

The fix isn’t a new spreadsheet template or a stricter policy memo. It’s built-in PLM that connects engineering change notices and bill of materials revisions to shop floor execution and field service history, so as designed, as built, and as serviced are three views of the same record instead of three separate systems that happen to reference the same part number.

If your team is still reconstructing that history by hand, ask how long it would take today if an auditor asked for it tomorrow. If the honest answer is longer than anyone would like, that’s worth a real conversation, not another workaround.

Ready to Close Your Traceability Gap?

If reconstructing a part’s history is still a manual, multi-system exercise for your team, let’s talk about what closing that gap looks like for your operation. Infor CloudSuite Industrial is the ERP we’ve built to close it: engineering, the shop floor, and field service on one system, not three.

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Want the Full Picture on Aerospace & Defense in 2026?

This traceability story is one piece of a bigger shift happening across the industry right now: record demand, an AI transition most manufacturers aren’t ready for, and an ERP decision that’s bigger than most companies treat it.

Read the Full Executive Perspective from Our CEO Paul Tedford