Challenge
A part can be perfect and still get scrapped, because its paperwork went missing
An aerospace part travels through a dozen tiers of suppliers and sub-suppliers, and its certificates of conformance, ISO documents and inspection records travel with it as paper in an envelope or a PDF stapled to an email. Lose the envelope and you have not lost a document. You have lost the part, because a part that cannot prove what it is cannot be installed.
Distributors and maintenance crews were absorbing that cost quietly: quarantined inventory, scrapped stock, and staff whose job had become chasing suppliers for a document that had already been sent twice.
Strategy
Attach the certificate to the part, not to the email
Use mature technology in a way nobody had bothered to. A QR code on the package resolves to the documents for that exact shipment, held in one place, reachable by everyone in the chain who is authorised to see them.
That turns a filing problem into a lookup. It only helps, though, if the certificates arrive in the system without anyone retyping them, which is where the customer's own back office comes in.
Solution
A cert platform on Azure, wired into the systems the certs already live in
SmartCert is a subscription platform built on Azure. Azure SQL Server holds the structured data, Blob Storage holds the documents, and Application Insights gives the team live visibility into a platform their customers depend on during a shipment. The application is .NET Core and React. Azure DevOps carried the backlog and the releases.
The half that makes it stick is the integration work. Certificates originate in the systems a distributor already runs, so TechFabric built connections into Epicor Prophet 21 and Dynamics 365 Business Central, letting cert data move between SmartCert and the ERP of record instead of being keyed in twice. A quality manager keeps working in the system they already know, and the certificate lands where the part is.
SmartCert is a collaboration between TechFabric and Aramid.
"We chose the Microsoft Azure platform because we knew it would allow us to build SmartCert in a slick, modular way with the ability to create a library of APIs to connect with common key systems (ERPs like SAP and Epicor to Quality Management Systems). That approach saved time and money for all stakeholders and makes SmartCert available to everyone in the supply chain."
Lyndon Lattie, Co-Founder, SmartCert
Results
Nothing lost, since launch
The certification loss rate after launch and early adoption was zero, and paper management went to nothing. Users reported a 10x improvement in efficiency and usability, an 85% increase in cert accuracy, and a 99% reduction in scrapped parts.
The number that matters most is the dull one. A part no longer gets thrown away because of an envelope.