Challenger Solutions gets AS9100 approval for military customers

“Everyone gets ISO 9000,” Challenger business development manager Richard Hancock told Electronics Weekly. “AS9100 means that  we can work on jobs to a better specification. You need it for anything that is in a fighting vehicle, anything that is on a warship and anything on a military plane.”

He argues that being AS9100 accredited brings in work from companies that handle avionics and other high-rel systems, even if some of it does not strictly need such a high standard of quality approval.

“If you don’t tick all the boxes at the start, they don’t want to use you,” he said, “because they don’t want to be using one company for this and another company for that, and a third company for something else.”

The firm is mid-sized, with 85 staff. “We are big enough to have the money and equipment, and also small enough to be flexible,” claimed Hancock. “We can to do a prototpe run, for example, then to do the production run two years later.”

It spreads its surface mount and through-hole PCB assembly, and the assembly of PCBs into enclosures, across has six facilities on the same site “so we have disaster recovery if something happens to one of them”, said Hancock.

Founded in 1994, the firm list aerospace & defence, oil & gas, communications, automotive and industrial controls as its target markets.

Source from:electronicsweekly