Quality Assurance & Risk Management Services can design a quality assurance program in accordance with ISO 9001 or AS9100 customized to fit your line of business.
Quality System Evaluations/Assessments
Our QA&RM team are experienced independent assessors in the aerospace industry. We can conduct compliance audits, gap assessments and data analysis to report trends and/or identify risks and areas for improvement, on site or at your supplier's facility.
Corrective Action System Design Development and Implementation
We have developed efficient and effective systems for corrective action tracking and reporting.
Quality Review of Design Requirements
We work closely with your design department to specify appropriate quality requirements. We review engineering design documentation to verify appropriate requirements are defined to ensure the quality and safety of your products.
We help reduce your costs by ensuring you have a cost effective supplier assurance program in place. We review procurement requirements, establish an approved supplier list, conduct supplier audits, conduct product inspections, analyze supplier performance data, to identify supplier risks, etc.
Enterprise & Continuous Risk Management
Enterprise Risk Management (ERM)
We can: brief agency top management on ERM; develop ERM policy statements and plans; organize and facilitate agency ERM workshops & conferences; train agency employees in Continuous Risk Management (CRM) for use in ERM; draft agency policies, regulations, handbooks, or other ERM-related documentation; conduct, analyze, and report on ERM-related surveys of agency personnel; and consult on CRM / ERM as needed.
Risk Management Plan Development
Our approach to risk management planning is based on successful NASA Agency Risk Management Procedural Requirements. We can develop a cost-effective risk management plan in conjunction with the program manager to define a risk-informed decision-making process. We use a practical approach focusing on key factors for the program's success.
Risk Management Process Development
Our team can help develop an integrated risk management process for identification and tracking risks in order to achieve customer requirements.
Risk Identification
Identification of risks must occur throughout the life of the program. We use a systematic process for the identification of risks including the characterization and consequences for both technical and programmatic issues to minimize uncertainty. Our approach is based on numerous accident investigations and causes of system failures and accidents.
Risk Tracking and Reporting
We provide a comprehensive risk tracking and reporting service which will ensure program visibility for identified risk, including the change in status as the program matures and risk environments change. We use the latest commercially available tools to conduct this function.
Risk Management Integration
We provide two levels of integration:
• The risk management program integrated into the program manager's processes for making technical and programmatic decisions.
• The risk management processes that proactively integrates inputs from safety, reliability and quality assurance as visible factors in the risk management decision process.
Probabilistic Risk Assessments
We can provide the relatively scarce world-class expertise needed to develop credible Probabilistic Risk Assessments (PRA) of your systems. Especially useful in the world of low-probability, high-consequence events (such as in operations of nuclear systems, human space flight systems, large passenger aircraft, and toxic chemical or infectious biological systems), PRA can help to identify what can go wrong, how likely it is to go wrong, and the consequences if it does go wrong.
System Safety Engineering
We provide engineering personnel with the specialized professional knowledge and skills in applying scientific and engineering principles, criteria, and techniques to identify and eliminate hazards in your systems, in order to reduce the associated mishap risk. Our personnel can perform the system safety analyses you need, including but not limited to:
Preliminary Hazard Analysis
Used to identify safety-critical areas in your systems, to provide an initial assessment of their hazards, and to identify appropriate hazard controls and follow-on actions.
Subsystem Hazard Analysis
Used to verify compliance with safety requirements contained in subsystem specifications and other applicable documents; identify previously unidentified hazards associated with the subsystem design including component failure modes, critical human error inputs, and hazards resulting from functional relationships between the components and equipment in each subsystem; and to recommend actions to eliminate identified hazards or control their associated risk to acceptable levels.
System Hazard Analysis
Used to verify compliance with safety requirements contained in system specifications and other applicable documents; identify previously unidentified hazards associated with subsystem interfaces and system functional faults; assess the risk associated with the total system design, including people, procedures, hardware, software, and facilities; and recommend actions necessary to eliminate identified hazards and/or control their associated risk to acceptable levels.
Operating and Support Hazard Analysis
Used to identify and evaluate the hazards or risks introduced into the system by operational and support activities and to evaluate the adequacy of procedures used to eliminate, control, or abate hazards or risks.
Fault Tree Analysis
Used to help identify, by means of deductive logic, the combinations of lower-level basic events or conditions that could lead to the occurrence of an undesired top-level event in your system. When adequate data are available, fault trees may be quantified, yielding an estimate of the probability of the top-level event.
System Safety Management
We can also provide personnel with the system safety management experience and knowledge to develop plans and recommend actions to identify, assess, mitigate, and continuously track, control, and document mishap risks encountered in the development, test, acquisition, use, and disposal of your systems (in every sense of the word).
Reliability Engineering
Design Analysis
We work closely with Systems Engineering in the cost effective application of reliability analysis techniques throughout the project life cycle. The applied analyses are based on operating environments and design goals to drive designs that are safe and will meet customer performance requirements.
Reliability Prediction
Reliability Engineering develops reliability block diagrams and system models to apportion reliability requirements to subsystems and components. Active communication with design engineers is accomplished to convey design improvements through use of redundancy, higher reliability components or additional screening and testing to meet system reliability performance requirements.
Failure Modes and Effects Analysis
We use FMEAs to identify causes and effects of system failures during the design life cycle. Our engineers actively work with systems engineering to identify system weaknesses in parts and design. We have helped many customers with recommendations for elimination or reduction of risks associated with failures identified through our FMEA process.
Parts Selection and Application
An integral part of our reliability program is the technical assistance we provide in part selection and reliability screening. We have worked with the NASA parts selection process for the past decade providing support to Space Lab and Space Station payloads.
Conference Planning
Quality Assurance and Risk Management Training
We provide training in any of the discipline areas. The training is customized to your commodity for a practical approach to meeting customer requirements.
Technical Conference Planning and Implementation
• We developed the first NASA Risk Management Conference while working for NASA Headquarters and have been actively involved in the success of the sixth event.
• Our conference planning approach is a critical communication and training vehicle for an interactive forum between our customers in communicating risk management principles and advances in techniques/technologies. We are actively supporting the NASA Headquarters Risk Management and System Safety community in workshop planning and execution.
• We also developed Quality Forum 2000, for NASA and Industry while working for NASA to highlight the importance of quality. This expertise is available to effectively improve communication in the quality assurance or risk management community.
