Our company has been AS9100 certified for a decade. We made it much harder than necessary in the beginning. As an example, the QC guy before me, required that gage pins be sent out for calibration. The first question I asked, was "How can you put a serial number on a .061 gage pin?" So you send the gage pin to a calibration lab, and immediately lose traceability if there are TWO gage pins of the same size! I became aware from the drawings I was inspecting to, that .001 was the tightest tolerance needed for our core product stream. I purchased a new set of gage blocks, gave them a 3 year calibration window, and verified my micrometer to .0001. I did not even tag them "Measure before use." I said that in the procedure. We do not need Deltronic pins for the parts we make, so we do not need to be that finicky. This would not work for everyone, but the takeaway is...how do you fail a test you write the questions for? Don't put anything in your procedure that you don't already do. One auditor said "You must have Computer Software to manage your calibration assets." I asked him to show me in the standard where it is required. We keep ours on a spreadsheet, and that is perfectly sufficient for what we do. Say what you already do, and do what you say, and any Quality Management System will be pretty easy to manage. Syteline is an excellent ERP program that makes it easy to include quality actions, it is expensive though. By the way, I got about 20 people to tell me the "Required Temperature" for a "QC Lab." I contacted an Engineer at NIST and asked. He said "What does it say in YOUR quality manual?" If you need to get certified, remember that the external auditor is your contractor. Have your own Quality System, and defend it. Be careful of consultants. Like the previous poster said, there is a lot of BS out there. I will answer any question asked of me....with one caveat. What we do does work well for us. You may have statutory, or regulatory requirements we do not have.