Consultant for NADCAP Accreditation in Heat Treating

[Maui]

I have been tasked with identifying the requirements we must satisfy in order to obtain NADCAP accreditation in our heat treating operations. I contacted the Performance Review Institute (PRI) which is the only auditing company I know of that is approved by the aerospace industry to perform official certification audits. They provided me with their summary list of criteria, but I think that I need to bring in a consultant or group to walk through our process and tell us where the gaps are and what we need to address before attempting to have the audits performed for accreditation. Does anyone here have any experience of going through this process? Is there a consultant that you would recommend hiring to help assist with getting things identified that need to be addressed? Any suggestions would be welcome. Thanks.

Maui

 

[Lyrl]

Our company went through this process (general heat treat, pyrometry, macro- and micro-hardness testing for heat treat, and carburizing) and the first audit was a nightmare. Not so much the audit itself (our auditor was highly knowledgeable and very gracious about explaining all the many findings) but the response process to the staff engineers was incredibly stressful. Take heart, though, we've had two more audits since then and received merit (18 month accreditation) on the most recent one and, while still stressful, they haven't been nearly as bad as the first one.

We had hired a consultant who used to work for PRI in the Chem Processes division: he had positive recommendations from other heat treaters who had gone through heat treat accreditation, and his very expensive advice turned out to be next to useless. In part because Chem Processes is so different and in part because the process had significantly evolved since he had worked for PRI.

If I had to go through it again I'd look for a consultant who is also a current or very recent auditor for the Heat Treat group, and would seriously consider the PRI program where you can hire a current auditor to come and do a "practice" audit.