Suppliers who accept orders from defence procurement – directly or through a customer in the chain – sooner or later encounter the contract clause “quality assurance in accordance with AQAP 2110”. This article explains what is behind it and what the standard means for your complaint management in practice.
What is AQAP 2110?
The AQAP series (Allied Quality Assurance Publications) are NATO’s quality assurance requirements for contractors. AQAP 2110 is the most important of them: it builds on ISO 9001 and adds contract-specific requirements – among others on risk management, configuration management, traceability and Government Quality Assurance, under which an official quality assurance representative gains insight into processes and records. Importantly, AQAP requirements are agreed contractually and are typically flowed down the supply chain – even a company that “only” supplies a defence supplier may find them in its contract.
What does this mean for complaint handling?
For dealing with nonconforming products and supplier complaints, the AQAP requirements boil down to one core: demonstrability. In practice:
- Nonconforming products must be controlled – blocked, identified, dispositioned.
- Root-cause analyses and corrective actions must be documented and tracked for effectiveness – the 8D process is the established format.
- Every case must be traceable: which batch, which part, which supplier, which decision.
- Records are evidence – they must be complete, durable and presentable in an audit.
- Changes to a case must be traceable: who changed what, and when? A retroactively “cleaned up” documentation is worthless in an audit.
The practical checklist
Check your current complaint management against five questions: Can you present the complete history of every complaint from the past two years? Is it visible who made which decision and when? Are deadlines and escalations documented rather than scattered across inboxes? Is evidence (photos, inspection reports) attached to the case or spread over network drives? And: could a government quality assurance representative see all of this without days of preparation?
What software has to deliver
Excel lists and e-mail folders fail exactly these questions – not out of ill will, but structurally: they have no change history, no central filing, no automatic deadline tracking. A complaint portal like claimandgain documents every case with a complete change history (who, when, what), keeps all evidence attached to the case and exports the complete file including its history as a PDF – the document you present in the audit.