Discover the future of aerospace standards in this episode of the Quality Horizon podcast. Host Susan Matson engages with industry experts Fortunato Nino Giardina and David Alexander to delve into the evolution of how the IAQG is bringing standards to market through their partnership with SAE International. Together, the two guests unravel the complexities of the standard development process, emphasizing transparency, efficiency, and global alignment. Listeners will gain insights into the IAQG’s seamless transition to IA standards, ensuring consistency and accessibility across regions. From multilingual availability to strategic partnerships, all aspects of the standard development journey are explored, promising a more inclusive and collaborative approach. With a focus on driving innovation and meeting stakeholder needs, this episode offers invaluable perspectives for professionals in the aerospace industry. Tune in to uncover the strategic initiatives shaping the future of aerospace standards and the relentless pursuit of excellence in quality management.
Learn more about the global partnership between IAQG and SAE - https://iaqg.org/iaqg-publishes-first-ia-standard/
Where to purchase IA standards - https://www.sae.org/iaqg
Discover the future of aerospace standards in this episode of the Quality Horizon podcast. Host Susan Matson engages with industry experts Fortunato Nino Giardina and David Alexander to delve into the evolution of how the IAQG is bringing standards to market through their partnership with SAE International. Together, the two guests unravel the complexities of the standard development process, emphasizing transparency, efficiency, and global alignment. Listeners will gain insights into the IAQG’s seamless transition to IA standards, ensuring consistency and accessibility across regions. From multilingual availability to strategic partnerships, all aspects of the standard development journey are explored, promising a more inclusive and collaborative approach. With a focus on driving innovation and meeting stakeholder needs, this episode offers invaluable perspectives for professionals in the aerospace industry. Tune in to uncover the strategic initiatives shaping the future of aerospace standards and the relentless pursuit of excellence in quality management.
Learn more about the global partnership between IAQG and SAE - https://iaqg.org/iaqg-publishes-first-ia-standard/
Where to purchase IA standards - https://www.sae.org/iaqg
Quality Horizon Podcast (SDO)
[00:00:00] Greetings, everyone, and welcome. I'm your host, Susan Matson, and with me today are Fortunato Nino, Giardina, and David Alexander. Nino is the Quality Executive Director for Leonardo. Additionally, he is the EAQG Sector Lead, the Lead for the IAQG Operations Council, and the Vice Lead for the IAQG Standards Council.
Susan: David is the Mobility Standards Leader for SAE International, a Global Publishing Partner of the IAQG. Welcome to the show, gentlemen.
Nino: A pleasure to be here.
Susan: Wonderful. So earlier this year, the IAQG released its first IA standard through an SDO with SAE. I'd like us to take a moment to help listeners [00:01:00] understand what this means for all IAQG standards moving forward and for those publishing and using these standards.
Susan: Nino, can you start off the discussion by explaining to everyone what is an SDO?
Nino: An SDO is the acronym for Standard Development Organization, as in the case of the IAQG, the organization that provides a service to publish the standard of the IAQG. And furthermore, in this case, we are also using the processes that this organization has developed.
Nino: And about that, we can say more later because we can see that we are extremely effective to develop our standards. So, this is essentially the publication part of the process that we are talking about when we refer to a standard development organization.
Susan: So, we just published that [00:02:00] first one. And which one was that?
Nino: It was the 9137. It was a pilot. It is the standard that gives the guidance to how to put together a 9100-certified organization against the NATO standards. Therefore, it is something that we considered relevant to work as a pilot. So, we started with something that essentially showed us which was the effectiveness of the process itself.
Susan: Thank you. David, I know that Nino just provided the definition of SDO, but what does it mean? Is it more than just publishing?
David: Absolutely. So, an SDO manages the whole process. What the SDO doesn't do is write the standard. That's down to the industry and to the stakeholder community.
David: But the SDO is the organization, which on behalf of the industry manages the whole [00:03:00]process. So, some key things that an SDO does. So, it provides a neutral platform. The word neutral is very important so that all stakeholders have the opportunity to contribute. The standard, the outputs.
David: Of the process. The standard reflects the needs of all. So, in this case, for SAE and for IAQG use, we have SAE Standards Works 2.0, which is the workspace for over 600 different technical committees across the mobility industries, including IAQG-1, which is the technical committee under the IAQG, which develops the IA9100 series.
David: So the workspace, it's a place that brings together the membership of the committee and provides one single place for them all to for them all to meet. It provides the document initiation process. It maintains the membership. It provides communication and discussion channels.
David: There's a repository for useful documents to the committee and [00:04:00] critically. It holds the balloting process, and this is the really important part of the process that, through voting and providing comments, resolves issues and improves the draft to be a consensus document for everybody.
David: So, the process is really vital. We as an SDO, as a standards development organization, ensure that this is a transparent and robust process, that it's rooted in procedure and ensures that the eventual standard is, can be trusted right across the community, the industry, of course, their partners, and then the end users, operators and government agencies and authorities.
David: But also, we need to be proactive and look to the future. So, the industry right now is really dynamic. It's a very exciting time in aerospace. Technology is also globally advancing very rapidly. And, we need to make sure that as the SDO we're providing. Great [00:05:00] value and leadership for our stakeholders.
David: So, we're always looking to increase the speed to market of the standards, although never at the expense of the integrity of the consensus process. So, for example, we drive efficiencies through the SAE Standards Works platform and process. And then one of the biggest and most exciting things that we're working on today is the true paradigm shift of digital transformation, developing standards.
David: Using collaborative tools, which through databases of the standards content, such as tolerances or requirements can then seamlessly integrate into the user systems through established software tools such as PLM systems and perhaps even integrate directly with the company's This digital standards journey is a complex one.
David: We're certainly not finished, but we are investing a lot in this effort. And we're already discussing and advising some of the IAQG standards writing teams [00:06:00] on how to write a digital standard.
Susan: Thank you very much, David. So, Nino, he gave a great explanation. But how is this different from what we used to do to what is happening today?
Nino: Yeah, before, we had a publication process based on three different standard development organizations located in the Americas, in Europe, and in Asia, even more than one in Asia. What we had was a parallel balloting and even the standard developing process that showed to be not effective enough in terms of time to market, in terms of fulfilling the requirements of our stakeholders as timely and therefore, we decided that to avoid this misalignment in the publication of a local publication of our standard in the different [00:07:00] languages and also the non-transparency of invisibility of the process of balloting because before we had a sort of blind ballot process. You would receive, draft/make your observations, but without seeing what was happening, what the others were observing, where it was.
Nino: They were saying and so on. And, even the disposition of the observations was not as visible as we expected it to be. And, therefore, we moved into a streamlined single process. And this, of course, was asking for a single SDO and yes, of course I appreciated the description David gave in general of the SDO and the role that SAE plays for all the standards that are published by SAE [00:08:00] in the case of the IAQG.
Nino: The reason why I focused on the publication and the process, and I could add. Publication and translation, and I will explain why and the process is because I'm used to giving my colleagues this metaphor. We appreciated a lot the process as if it was a machine, a great car, a very performing car in the SAE.
Nino: But we as the IAQG, we say we are driving that car. So, all the entities that are making this process work, this, I need to be very clear, are IAQG entities. And, the way we put the resources in that entities is completely governed under the governance of the IAQG. So, in this sense, the agreement between [00:09:00] IAQG and SAE is.
Nino: We are going to use this fantastic car, but we will drive the car abiding by the rules, of course, so they [SAE] we don't want to do anything disruptive. We had a discussion among us, so I know that David agrees with what I'm saying. We will drive the car toward the strategic objectives of the IAQG, abiding by the rules by fulfilling putting into this car, our driving capability.
Nino: The car is great. The car is absolutely great. The process of the car is providing us a lot of visibility. It's a fantastic platform as David mentioned, that allows everyone to provide, observations with full visibility of what the others are doing.
Nino: There is a single streamlined process. And what is [00:10:00] more about the entities we structured following the original structure of that SAE Recommend it. We structured the process in two layers, two levels, two tiers. One is the council, the standard council, and the other one is the standard management committee.
Nino: The committee, to make it short, is essentially a technical body. The council is the strategic body that manages and drives the process. The council the members of the council are the full members of the IAQG, the 27 full members of the IAQG. And, this already shows that IAQG is driving this fantastic car.
Nino: Okay. Within the technical body, the committee, we have all the members. Also, the associate and affiliate members of the IAQG. And what is very [00:11:00] interesting, good, and is offering a lot of opportunities, is that we admitted at committee level to get their contribution in the development of standards and observations also external entities that would not be eligible to become IAQG members as, for example, regulatory authorities that are our fundamental stakeholders for us and that we could not.
Nino: Accept as members. So, this approach to a single committee is providing IAQG a way to welcome in our process, in our standard development process Also stakeholders and relevant entities that are very important to be faster and quicker to the target of the, what the market is asking, what our stakeholders are asking.
Nino: And just to mention [00:12:00] some of them… we have DCMA, we have NASA in the committee, we have ESA in Europe, and we are very proud to say that we are going to have NATO in the committee. And this is something that we were not used to before because our way of working was quite different, more in the previous process. Also, this flexibility in allowing stakeholders to take part in our processes is a valuable improvement that we are having. And yeah, therefore, I think that what we have done in a single process for, and asking a single SDO, SAE to help us take a great leap, more than improvement compared to before.
Susan: If I understand you correctly, we've got in today's process, much more transparency with involving everyone all at once at the [00:13:00] same time. And you said it earlier, so much opportunity when everyone's talking together at the same time and being able to collectively bring something to market.
Susan: I don't know if everyone listening today realizes the contribution and the benefit that's going to bring to them. So how did SAE become this global publishing partner? Was there a set of criteria that they had to adhere to? Can you walk us through that process?
Nino: The reason why SAE became a partner is that it simply was the only entity that fulfilled the requirements that IAQG had. As a whole, the only organization that offered to fulfill all the requirements in terms of process, publication, capability, translation, everything.
Nino: Because publication means also managing the distribution and selling the copies of the standard and everything, we need to remember that SAE was already familiar because the American sector was [00:15:00] already working with SAE as the SDO, but we reviewed the old process and the way.
Nino: IAQG is managing the process to make it common among all the sectors and to improve to a new process. So, this new process is a chance for all the sectors. It's not true that the Asian and the European sector have been aligned to something that was already in place in the Americas.
Nino: We designed together something new, as I described before, and we are very happy. Everyone is happy, even the ones that thought that this change could have been difficult. Even putting at risk the networks that we created, for example, in Europe, in Asia. No, I would say the opposite.
Nino: The network is stronger. I can witness for Europe that we had a particular care in keeping all the ones that were contributing before [00:16:00] contributing now in the committee and in the total absolute transparency, visibility, as you said, all together in the same time in the same process. And, is something that requires a very good platform because we are talking about much more than 200.
Nino: I think we receive a lot of comments, but for the platform. Helps us to manage and to cope. We also, with the huge number of contributors, that we have. So, I think that now we are all happy about what how we are working on it. This doesn't mean that I don’t personally, very often, have to explain and also because I'm still investing in Europe to strengthen this network to contribute all together. And I am very happy to say and proud to say that the previous European SDO ASD-Stand now [00:17:00] is contributing to the committee. As I said before, being an absolutely relevant stakeholder in Europe. Being inclusive and taking care of the existing network without disrupting or spoiling any relationship, we, I think succeeded in improving, bringing all together. And we are now very close to the final configuration of everything.
Nino: Of course, I mentioned before, the first time that is a pilot and yes, of course, there are lessons we learned from the pilot, and we are fixing all these things.
Susan: Thank you, Nino. So, David, Nino alluded to the fact that in the Americas, SAE was already the publisher. We already discussed how different the process is and how [00:18:00] it's vastly improved from a user standpoint, from those out purchasing and using the standard, at least in the Americas, are they seeing a difference?
David: There shouldn't really be a difference at all. It's a big change for the IAQG. A very positive one, as Nino had said, for the speed to market, for the transparency, and so on. And, we're really proud to be partners of the IAQG in this endeavor and really take the relationship to the next level. But in terms of the actual user experience, there shouldn't be a big difference. IAQG, as Nino said, had always used SDOs to develop the standards, but just it was done regionally and through multiple SDOs. But the result, the end product was always the same standard, the same content was used globally. So, SAE was nominally the SDO for the Americas sector, published the AS9100 series of standards. However, even before this change, there were still many AS Standards that were purchased and used in Europe [00:19:00] and Asia, too. Now there's just one SDO. And, I think from an IAQG perspective, it's very positive because everyone is now on the same page. Part of the same single global committee. So, the overhead of coordinating between different SDOs, different processes in different parts of the world has been eliminated.
David: And we always remember that the I in IAQG is international and the new process ensures that the global quality community is truly developing standards globally and as a community today and there is a transition process of moving to the IA standards and the letters are just really part of what we call the unique identifier.
David: For the standard. It's a combination of letters and numbers that denotes the standard and also provide some denotation of the SDO. AS stands for aerospace standard. EN [00:20:00] stands for European norm. JISQ is a Japanese standard for quality. And IA is. international aerospace.
David: So it's that combination of the letters, along with the number of the 9100, 9137, 9145, and so on that make it the identity of that particular standard. So really, the end user will see perhaps a new letter combination with IA, but the content will still be the same high-quality standards that the IAQG has developed.
Susan: Great. Thank you for that explanation. Nino, David just alluded to that you've got some existing standards out there under those three regions, and we have a brand new one. That's an IA. So are we just simply renaming? How is the transition from the current standards that are out there and available for people to the new ones? Is there a process? Are they [00:21:00] getting done as they are up for renewal or up for revision? How is that working?
Nino: We decided to follow the natural revision cycle of the standards, so it's not our intention to do a massive renaming of all the standards of the 9100 series. We are simply considering each standard when it goes to be reviewed, or we need to review it.
Nino: We use the new process. For example, the 9137, we launched the new process not from the beginning of the review, but from half, let me say the renew, because what we wanted to test was the ballot part of the new process and the translation part of the new process. So, we are using each single standard to test single phases of the new process.
Nino: And so progressively, yes, what I have to [00:22:00] clarify and admit is that there will be, in the future, for a certain amount of months, some standards still in the old naming convention and managed by the previous SDOs by the way. And new standards that are published with the new naming the IA code.
Nino: Just to give you an example, in the recent. months, we even published a standard with the old process, the one with the three SDOs, because it was too late, the standard was in the ballot phase, so it made no sense to change it just for the final phase of the process. So, the process is driving. The process is driving the transition of each document from its previous to the new naming.
Nino: Of course, this implies a bit of clarity and order in managing the [00:23:00] two things. It implies also a clear agreement and even wording verbiage on the old standards to clarify. That the new one that are deemed to be applicable are the IA in case an IA exists. So we are managing a transition, but not a massive renaming of all the standards together.
Susan: The IAs, as they are released and renamed, David, where can someone buy them? What languages can they buy them in? How does that work?
David: Oh, in many places. As well as providing the standards for direct sales through the SAE website, through the SAE Mobilus 4.0 platform, SAE has agreements with a very large number of, what we call, resellers who take standards, SAE standards and other standards, and deliver these documents to the industry. [00:24:00] These can be global aggregators who provide an extremely large package of many different standards to their customers to regional resellers who might specialize in a particular part of the world.
David: And also, we have agreements with national standards bodies for customers to purchase those standards on a national basis. You can purchase them from all of the relevant standards delivery channels and, as previously mentioned, all of the IA standards will be translated.
David: So, the IAQG will look at the standards based on needs, but the IA standards are translated just as with IA 9137 and in the future documents, and they'll be available in English, in French, German, Italian, in Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. And remember, this is the same content, it's just presented globally.
Susan: So, gentlemen, both of you… I wanted to thank you for [00:25:00] this time. We've talked a lot about the value and I just want to get a final thought from both of you. The value of this process. We talked about speed. We talked about transparency. We talked about visibility. Nino, at the end of all of this, why was this a need and what is the real value about doing this moving forward?
Nino: I think that we, bit-by-bit, addressed all the components of that. Yes, IAQG is international and we wanted to work internationally because we called ourselves international, but then we used to work, based on the geography based on the sectors. And that showed to be proven to be not effective in terms of expectation for our stakeholders more transparency, but also much more opportunity to take part in it. So, to welcome [00:26:00] contributors in this process, we said about languages needed to be highlighted and underlined because it's an extremely challenging requirement. The one of the IAQG, because in our process, the way we designed it, the publication of all the languages that David mentions is going to happen together with the English version in the past. The experience that was for all the stakeholders and all the users in the past was seeing the language English coming being published and then even years later. The single languages in the countries we are going to do it simultaneously with the publication immediately after the ballot as we I said, the strategic level in the council.
Nino: So, it means that the time for the translation is very short. Some. [00:27:00] A month, no more than that. And, this is one of the lessons learned that we had from the pilot. We have solutions to make it more effective to fulfill this requirement of absolutely. Timely publication in all languages. All these things together, in my opinion, can give the idea of, I would even say, a different kind of service that the IAQG wants to do to the aerospace and defense sector.
susan: Thank you, David. Anything to add?
David: I loved Nino's analogy of the car. I think it's brilliant. It works on so many different levels. We've been doing this since developing and publishing standards since 1912. And so, it's really second nature to us. It's just great to be able to do this.
David: With IAQG on a global basis to push on the analogy with the car. We will keep making the car better. We'll keep improving the car, keep improving the performance of the car. What we do, as a facilitator, and the [00:28:00] IAQG the industry and the stakeholders will continue to drive that car collectively, and I think it's great that we're able to work again as a true partner with the IAQG in improving our processes, improving our approach and looking at the digital standards and collaborative authoring and the future. But one of the areas that I think we're most pleased with is where we see from a writing team level, from the authoring to the committee level, where the technical balloting and that process is done to the governance and strategic level with the IAQG Standards Council, that the IAQG now is doing it all together on a truly Global basis, and I think that's a really key component for future success in the quality community.
Susan: Gentlemen, thank you both. I really appreciate this time and hope all of our listeners are as enlightened as I am with getting an understanding of what this whole process means and how these [00:29:00] changes are going to be such a benefit moving forward for the industry as a whole. So, thank you.
Nino: Thank you, Susan.
Nino: Thank you, David.
David: Thank you very much, Susan. Thank you, Nina.
Susan: Absolutely. Best of luck on the work ahead and continuing to improve the car and drive the car. This is Susan Matson, and you have been listening to the IAQG Quality Horizon until next time, stay safe.