VP Quality

Crane Aerospace and Electronics has an exciting opportunity for a Vice President of Quality at our Elyria, OH or Lynnwood, WA location.

About Crane:

Crane Aerospace & Electronics supplies critical systems and components to the aerospace and defense markets. You’ll find Crane Aerospace & Electronics in some of the toughest environments: from engines to landing gear; from satellites to medical implants and from missiles to unmanned aerial systems (UAS).

Our Crane Aerospace & Electronics Elyria facility has been a bedrock in the community-friendly town of Elyria, Ohio, for more than a century. Known for our excellence in pumping technology, our Elyria site produced the first-ever positive displacement pump for high performance piston engine aircraft and even supplied pumps for Charles Lindbergh in the 1930s. We have more than 150,000 fuel and lubrication pumps in service today and are proud to offer custom thermal management system solutions for a range of next-gen applications.

Job Summary:

The Vice President of Quality is responsible for overseeing quality assurance and control programs, ensuring compliance with stringent Aerospace & Defense (CAE) industry and government regulations and developing quality strategies to improve products and processes across all Crane Aerospace & Electronics businesses. The VP Quality is responsible for building a quality culture, managing audits, leading corrective actions, and partnering with other departments like engineering, operations, and supply chain to drive improvements in key metrics such as First Pass Yield and Cost of Poor Quality.

The VP Quality will act as the lead facilitator across all CAE sites of Advanced Product Quality Planning (APQP) and Production Part Approval Process (PPAP). This person will drive breakthrough process improvements in Quality through requirements definition and full compliance flow-down into value streams including employee training and awareness to assure safety, airworthiness, conformity, and product reliability requirements are met. They will also drive and support actions to meet all CAE strategic priorities for Growth, Customer Service and Quality.

Essential Functions:

• Develop and implement the AS9145 standard requirements for the Product Development Process (PDP) using Advanced Product Quality Planning (APQP) and Production Part Approval Process (PPAP) methodologies for all sites

• Ensure that customer engineering design requirements are clearly fulfilled and that we can meet the manufacturability and quality requirements of the products supplied to the customer.

• Develop and establish manufacturing processes to produce products that consistently meet all requirements during the actual production run at the quoted production rate of the manufacturing process.

• Implement APQP core tools across all CAE sites for key products and key processes to significantly improve First Pass Yield, COPQ and reduce customer returns.

• Leadership & Strategy:

• Provide strategic direction for the quality function, aligning with organizational goals and objectives.

• Lead and mentor a team of quality professionals, fostering a culture of accountability and continuous improvement.

• Collaborate with engineering, manufacturing, and supply chain teams to ensure product and process quality.

• Drive initiatives to improve product quality, reduce defects, and enhance customer satisfaction.

• Develop and implement all five phases of APQP starting with product concept and extending throughout the product life cycle.

  • Phase 1 – Planning - capture customer inputs, benchmark data, lessons learned, regulatory requirements, technical specifications, and strategy into a product concept and a realization plan. This includes high-level technical, quality, and cost targets.

  • Phase 2 – Product Design and Development - translate the technical, quality, and cost requirements into a controlled, verified, and validated product design. Design validation is achieved using prototype, development, or production parts in test environments that can represent the customer’s installation and subject the product to extreme conditions required by contract or regulation.

  • Phase 3 – Process Design and Development - design and develop the production processes needed to produce product that consistently fulfill technical, quality, and cost requirements while operating at the customer demand rate.

  • Phase 4 – Product and Process Validation - validate that product fulfills the design requirements and the process has demonstrated the capability to constantly produce conforming products at the customer demand rate. Product validation is achieved using product produced fr