NorthStar Blog

Canada's aerospace industry is entering a generational inflection point, and the signals are coming from every direction at once

CM Red Flag #10: The Blame Olympics When every failure turns into a finger-pointing contest. If your post-incident meetings feel more like courtroom dramas than problem-solving sessions, you’re not dealing with a culture issue. You’re dealing with a configuration management failure. When no one can agree on which version was used, what changed, who approved it, or when it happened, blame fills the vacuum left by missing data.

CM Red Flag #9: Duplication of Effort When teams keep rebuilding what already exists. If you’ve ever discovered that three departments created three different versions of the same drawing, spec, or process document, you’re not looking at inefficiency. You’re dealing with a trust problem. When people stop trusting the system, they stop using it. And when they stop using it, they come up with their own work-arounds. That is not initiative. That is a configuration management failure.

CM Red Flag #8: Audit Nightmares When a simple question turns into a scramble for spreadsheets. Audits are the key to improvements as audits don’t create configuration problems, they expose them. If the words “traceability,” “revision history,” or “as-built configuration” cause visible stress in the room, that’s not audit anxiety, that’s a configuration management gap finally being put under a spotlight.

CM Red Flag #6: No Clear Baselines When nobody can say with confidence what was ordered, designed, approved, and actually built. A baseline is a product’s configuration at a defined point in time that establishes the reference for controlling changes, performing verification activities, and supporting other management functions. Without baselines, every product’s lifecycle phase becomes guesswork. Design evolves informally, production adapts on the fly, Quality chases moving targets, and support teams have no idea what was delivered. If nobody can easily answer the question, “What is our current configuration?” then your Configuration Management isn’t just weak, it’s not working.

When change exists, but only theoretically. Nothing kills momentum like a change request that gets created but never approved and implemented.. The drawing is wrong. The assembly isn’t fitting. A supplier is using the old spec. Everyone knows a change is needed, but the Engineering Change Order (ECO) sits unapproved or unreleased for weeks, even months. Meanwhile production keeps building, quality keeps rejecting, engineering keeps rewriting emails, and cost keeps climbing. Slow or stalled change control is one of the most expensive forms of waste in manufacturing — and one of the clearest indicators of weak configuration management.

CM Red Flag #5: Inconsistent BOMs and Data Misalignment When your systems don’t agree, your product can’t either. If you ask Engineering, Manufacturing, and Supply Chain what the Bill of Material is, and you get three different answers, you don’t have a BOM problem. You have a configuration management breakdown. Inconsistent BOMs are one of the fastest ways to lose control of cost, quality, and schedule, especially in large manufacturing environments with multiple systems and suppliers.

When “the way Joe does it” becomes the unofficial work instruction. Every company that manufactures has experts, the operators who’ve been there forever, the techs who can build an assembly blindfolded, the inspectors who can hear a defect before they see it. But when the entire process depends on those people, not the system, you’ve got a configuration problem waiting to explode.

Configuration Management (CM), as defined by the main industry standards ISO 10007, AS9100, EIA-649, and MIL-HDBK-61A explained

When production becomes a revolving door of fixes, delays, and do-overs. Frequent rework and scrap isn’t just “a manufacturing problem.” It’s usually a configuration management problem. If parts keep failing fit checks or quality compliance testing, it’s a sign that something changed: a drawing, a process, a spec, a supplier method and that change never made it to the people or systems that needed it. Either the product design evolved, but the organization didn’t get notified or the Production problem got raised, but didn’t reach Engineering for their action.

Different Teams Working from Different Versions Planning, Production, and other downstream stakeholders are all referencing slightly different revisions of the same drawing or spec and no one’s quite sure which one is latest released revision.

I’ve spent over 35 years in the Canadian aerospace industry, and I’ve learned to identify the patterns, the small cracks that, left unchecked, can cause massive cost overruns, schedule delays and even bring programs to a halt. This series explores those cracks, those signs of weak or missing configuration management, and what to do about them.

CM Red Flag #7: High Customer Returns & Warranty Claims When the real problems show up after your product leaves the building. Warranty claims are rarely a surprise. They are the delayed echo of problems that started much earlier, in design changes, documentation gaps, supplier misalignment, or uncontrolled configuration drift. When customer returns climb or warranty issues repeat, it’s often blamed on quality, suppliers, or “unexpected use.” More often than not, the root cause is weak configuration management.