New Tech Europe | Jan 2017 | Digital Edition

AS9100 Transition Drives Technical Excellence

Arthur Ackerman, Mini-Circuits

Technical excellence at Mini-Circuits is coming into sharper focus as we approach the fifth decade since our founding by Harvey Kaylie in 1969. This focus has been emphasized in our current initiative to recertify our quality management system (QMS) to the new revision of AS9100. As you may expect, Mini-Circuits places the highest priority on product quality, and this has had many benefits for us and our customers. Our customer returns have been consistently below 10 PPM over the past year, and we will continue finding ways to drive this metric even closer to zero. Mini-Circuits is a world-renowned innovator and supplier to the RF and microwave industries with more than 15,000 active component-level devices and test systems. Our stated commitment to our customers is to provide product continuity and

avoid obsoleting any products that have been designed into customer systems. In addition to maintaining availability of active legacy models, we regularly add more than 1000 new products to our line annually. This places a heavy burden on us to ensure the robustness of design and materials as well as the overall quality of our systems. Consequently, while the new revision of AS9100 includes a number of significant changes, many of its elements have historically been incorporated into Mini-Circuits’ QMS. We received our first ISO9001 certification in 1997, and this was expanded to AS9100 in 2008 based on the requirements of our aerospace customers. AS9100 Revision D has finally been released after months of delays, marking the first major change to the standard in many years. While some suppliers look

at these changes with trepidation, Mini-Circuits welcomes them and considers the new requirements a validation of our existing policies. The revised standard takes previously ‘generic’ elements and expands upon them to build a more rigorous approach to quality and technical excellence as demanded by the aerospace industry. Our challenge is to incorporate these elements into our already-rigorous QMS. Mini-Circuits has two full- time internal auditors and a team of twenty volunteer auditors from various departments. We typically conduct more than 150 internal audits per year. Our transition to Revision D has included external training of key members and a formal internal retraining of all supervisory staff to the rewrite of our QMS. The major changes to the standard

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