The National Aerospace Supply Chain Integrity Initiative (NASCII) is an independent initiative focused on developing practical frameworks to strengthen supplier resilience, traceability, governance, compliance, and supply chain integrity across the U.S. aerospace sector. Its work examines issues including supplier risk, counterfeit and unapproved parts, documentation integrity, qualified industrial capacity, and the use of analytics and AI to identify emerging risks earlier. NASCII was founded by aerospace supply chain professional Yane Brunacio. Pulse 2.0 interviewed NASCII Founder Yane Brunacio to learn more.
Yane Brunacio’s Background
When asked about her background, Brunacio shared:
My background is in supply chain management, strategic sourcing, procurement, and supplier development, with more than ten years of experience across the aerospace and industrial sectors.
A large part of my career has been in aerospace, where I worked with increasingly complex supply chains and responsibilities. I started in procurement and supplier management and later moved into roles supporting critical aircraft systems and components, including landing gear and hydraulic systems. As my career progressed, my work became increasingly focused on supplier performance, risk management, strategic sourcing decisions, and bringing different teams together to solve complex supply chain problems before they affected operations.
The pandemic was probably one of the experiences that shaped my perspective the most. I played an active role in supplier recovery efforts at a time when the aerospace industry was facing significant capacity and supply disruptions. When you are dealing with critical aircraft components, you quickly realize that a supplier problem is rarely just a purchasing problem. It can involve capacity, quality, engineering, logistics, documentation, sub-tier suppliers, and sometimes very limited alternatives.
That experience changed the way I looked at supply chain risk. Price, delivery, and inventory will always matter, but I became much more interested in what happens before a major disruption: What signals were already there? Could we have identified the vulnerability earlier? Did we really understand the supplier’s capacity and dependencies? Did the right teams have the information they needed to act?
Those questions stayed with me throughout my career. They led me to focus more deeply on supplier resilience, traceability, compliance, supplier development, and risk management. I also decided to pursue graduate studies in Business Analytics because I saw an opportunity to combine the practical experience I had built in aerospace with data and analytical tools that could support better supply chain decisions.
Over time, I realized that many of the challenges I had experienced were not unique to one company, one supplier, or one aircraft program. They reflected broader vulnerabilities across a highly interconnected aerospace supply chain, where a disruption at one critical or specialized supplier can have consequences far beyond that individual organization.
That is really where NASCII came from. I founded the National Aerospace Supply Chain Integrity Initiative to bring together my industry experience, research, and interest in data-driven risk management and translate them into practical approaches for strengthening supplier resilience, traceability, and supply chain integrity across the U.S. aerospace sector.
Why NASCII Was Created
When asked what prompted her to launch NASCII and which weaknesses require the most urgent attention, Brunacio explained:
What prompted me to launch NASCII was the realization that many of the supply chain problems I had experienced throughout my career were not isolated events. The same vulnerabilities kept appearing in different forms: limited qualified capacity, long lead times, dependency on highly specialized suppliers, limited visibility beyond direct suppliers, and information that was often fragmented across organizations.
My experience during major aerospace supply chain disruptions made this especially clear. I saw how quickly a problem deep within the supply chain could move downstream and affect much larger operations. In aerospace, replacing a supplier is not always a quick solution. A new source may require technical qualification, certification, engineering approval, specific manufacturing capabilities, and complete supporting documentation before it can support production.
That made me start asking a different question: instead of focusing only on how we recover after a disruption, how can we better understand the conditions that allow those disruptions to develop in the first place?
That question became one of the foundations of NASCII.
What concerned me was not one individual problem, but how interconnected these vulnerabilities were. A capacity constraint can expose a sourcing dependency. A documentation issue can become a traceability concern. A supplier problem several tiers upstream can eventually affect production or maintenance much further downstream.
I created NASCII because I wanted to look at those issues as parts of the same system rather than as separate supply chain problems.
Greatest Supply Chain Vulnerabilities
When asked where she sees the greatest vulnerabilities today and how the risks differ between commercial aviation and defense programs, Brunacio identified three primary areas:
I see the greatest vulnerabilities today in three areas: limited visibility beyond direct suppliers, weaknesses in documentation and traceability, and concentration of qualified capacity.
The first is visibility. Aerospace supply chains are highly tiered, and organizations often have much better information about their direct suppliers than about the critical suppliers operating further upstream. That can create hidden dependencies. Two companies may appear to have different suppliers, for example, while both ultimately depend on the same forge, material source, special-process provider, or other specialized capability. If that shared dependency is disrupted, the impact can spread much more broadly than expected.
The second vulnerability is documentation integrity and traceability. Aerospace depends heavily on confidence in the identity, history, conformity, and airworthiness documentation associated with a component. The industry has made significant progress, but there are still areas where documentation can move across multiple organizations, systems, and formats, making verification more difficult. That creates opportunities for errors, inconsistencies, and, in more serious cases, falsified documentation or unapproved parts to enter the supply chain.
For me, counterfeit and unapproved parts are not simply a purchasing issue. They are a supply chain integrity issue. Preventing them requires more than checking a document at the point of receipt. It requires stronger supplier qualification, better verification of vendors and documentation, improved traceability, effective inspection, and better information sharing throughout the lifecycle of a part.
The third major vulnerability is qualified capacity. Aerospace capacity is very different from general manufacturing capacity. A supplier may have equipment and production capability, but that does not necessarily mean it is qualified to manufacture a specific aerospace component. Certification, engineering approvals, specialized processes, quality requirements, materials, and traceability can make alternative sourcing difficult and slow. That is why shortages affecting a relatively small or low-value component can sometimes have a disproportionately large impact on aircraft production or maintenance.
Commercial aviation and defense programs share many of these vulnerabilities because they can rely on the same specialized materials, suppliers, manufacturing processes, and technical workforce. But the consequences and operating priorities can be different.
In commercial aviation, supply chain disruptions are often felt through delayed aircraft deliveries, longer maintenance turnaround times, shortages of engines or spare parts, increased operating costs, and aircraft remaining out of service longer than planned. Airlines, manufacturers, and MRO organizations are all under pressure to keep aircraft available while supporting growing demand.
Defense programs face many of the same capacity and supplier risks, but the consequences can extend more directly to mission readiness, sustainment, and the ability to maintain critical platforms over long service lives. Defense supply chains may also operate under additional sourcing, security, regulatory, and compliance constraints, which can further limit the number of acceptable alternatives when a supplier becomes unavailable.
What concerns me most is the overlap between the two. Commercial and defense aerospace are not completely separate industrial systems. In many cases, they compete for or depend on the same qualified materials, specialized manufacturing processes, suppliers, and technical capabilities. A constraint in one part of that industrial base can therefore create pressure across multiple programs.
That is why I believe supplier risk has to be viewed as more than a Tier 1 performance issue. The real challenge is understanding where critical dependencies exist, whether documentation and traceability remain reliable throughout the supply chain, and whether organizations can identify emerging vulnerabilities early enough to act before they become production, maintenance, safety, or readiness problems.
Safety-Critical Forged Components
When asked about NASCII’s white paper on safety-critical forged aerospace components and the structural constraints driving shortages and extended lead times, Brunacio detailed:
Safety-critical forged components are especially challenging because the constraint is not just production volume, it is qualified production capability.
These parts typically depend on a sequence of highly specialized steps, including approved raw materials, forging, heat treatment, precision machining, non-destructive testing, surface treatments, inspection, and certification. Each of those steps may have its own capacity limitations, and a delay at one stage can affect the entire downstream schedule.
Another structural issue is that aerospace cannot add replacement capacity quickly. A new supplier, process, or material source may need technical qualification, engineering approval, customer acceptance, certification, and complete supporting documentation before it can be used. So even when another manufacturer has equipment available, that does not necessarily mean it can become a qualified aerospace source in the timeframe the industry needs.
There is also a capital and specialization problem. Forging capacity, special processes, advanced materials, and experienced technical personnel are difficult to expand rapidly. Those capabilities often support multiple programs simultaneously, so when demand rises across production and maintenance at the same time, bottlenecks can become persistent rather than temporary.
That is why extended lead times in these components are not simply a scheduling issue. They reflect a deeper mismatch between demand and the amount of qualified industrial capability available to support it.
The national readiness concern comes from the role these components play in high-consequence systems. Forged parts are used in areas such as engines, landing gear, and structural applications, where substitution is difficult and failure is not an acceptable option. When a critical component has long qualification cycles and limited qualified sources, a prolonged disruption can affect production, sustainment, maintenance recovery, and aircraft availability across the broader aerospace industrial base.
For me, that changes the way the industry should think about resilience. The question is not only, “How much capacity do we have?” It is, “How much qualified, certifiable, and recoverable capacity do we actually have when a disruption occurs?”
That is the issue I wanted the white paper to highlight. Readiness depends not only on demand or production targets, but on whether the industrial base has enough qualified capability, redundancy, and recovery options to sustain critical aerospace operations over time.
Integrated Supply Chain Governance
When asked what NASCII’s integrated governance methodology would look like in practice, Brunacio explained:
In practice, the model is about connecting information and decisions that already exist across the organization, but are often managed separately.
Procurement may be monitoring delivery performance and supplier capacity. Quality may be seeing recurring nonconformances. Engineering may know that a particular component has very limited alternatives or a long qualification cycle. Maintenance may be experiencing longer repair times or increasing demand for the same part. Regulatory and compliance teams may identify documentation or certification concerns.
Each function is seeing part of the risk. The challenge is making sure those signals come together early enough for the organization to understand the full picture and act on it.
That is where NASCII comes in. Rather than asking companies to replace their existing procurement, quality, engineering, maintenance, or compliance systems, the methodology creates a common governance layer across them. Organizations would identify their most critical suppliers, components, and dependencies, establish common risk indicators and escalation criteria, and define who needs to be involved when those indicators begin to change.
Imagine, for example, that a supplier is still delivering on time, so procurement does not yet see a major problem. At the same time, quality is seeing recurring issues, lead times are gradually increasing, and a capacity assessment identifies dependence on a constrained sub-tier process. Individually, those signals may not appear critical. When viewed together, however, they may provide an early indication that the supplier’s risk profile is changing.
The organization can then act before the situation becomes a disruption. Depending on the risk, that could involve working with the supplier on a recovery or development plan, reviewing capacity, increasing oversight, evaluating an alternative source, involving engineering earlier, or strengthening documentation and traceability controls.
Data analytics and AI can help connect and prioritize those signals, but they support the governance process rather than replace professional judgment. In aerospace, decisions involving safety-critical components still require the appropriate engineering, quality, regulatory, and operational expertise.
I also see implementation as something that can start small. An organization could begin with a defined group of critical suppliers or components, establish a baseline, apply the methodology, measure the results, and refine it before expanding to other areas.
The goal is not another dashboard. The goal is to create a repeatable way for the right people to see the right risk signals early enough to make a coordinated decision.
Improving Multi-Tier Traceability
When asked how aerospace manufacturers and suppliers can improve traceability across multiple tiers of the supply chain, Brunacio said:
Traceability has to be treated as a lifecycle capability, not simply as documentation that is checked when a part arrives.
A component may move through a manufacturer, special-process provider, distributor, repair organization, and other intermediaries before it reaches an aircraft. Every transfer creates another point where information can become incomplete, inconsistent, disconnected from the physical part, or difficult to verify later.
I believe the first step is establishing a clear minimum set of information that should remain connected to the component throughout that lifecycle. Depending on the part, that can include its source, material and manufacturing records, special processes, inspection history, certifications, authorized release documentation, and other information necessary to establish its identity and conformity.
The second piece is verification. Having documentation is not the same as knowing that the documentation is authentic. Organizations need stronger controls for verifying both suppliers and records, particularly when parts move through distributors, brokers, repair organizations, or multiple tiers of the supply chain.
Digital documentation and authentication tools can make that process much stronger, especially when they allow important information to be validated rather than simply stored.
There is also a significant interoperability challenge. Different organizations may use different ERP systems, quality systems, databases, and document formats, and smaller suppliers may have very different levels of digital maturity. I don’t think the answer is requiring every company to use the same technology.
The more realistic objective is to establish common expectations for what information needs to follow a component, how that information is verified, and who is accountable for maintaining it when custody changes.
Risk should also determine the level of traceability. A safety-critical or life-limited component should not necessarily be treated the same way as a low-criticality standard item. The greater the consequence of losing confidence in a component’s origin, condition, or conformity, the stronger the verification and traceability controls should be.
This is also where better information sharing across the industry becomes important. If a documentation discrepancy, questionable supplier, or unapproved part is identified in one part of the ecosystem, that information can be valuable elsewhere. Traceability becomes much more effective when organizations are not only maintaining their own records, but also improving their ability to verify information across organizational boundaries.
Ultimately, technology is an important part of the solution, but digitizing a weak process does not make it a strong one. Effective traceability requires reliable data, verification, clear accountability, and the ability to preserve confidence in a component’s history as it moves through the supply chain.
AI And Predictive Risk Management
When asked what role artificial intelligence and data analytics can realistically play in supplier governance, counterfeit-part detection, compliance monitoring, and predictive risk management, Brunacio noted:
Artificial intelligence and data analytics can play an important role, but I see them primarily as tools for identifying patterns, prioritizing risk, and supporting human decision-making rather than replacing it.
Aerospace organizations already generate large amounts of supplier, quality, procurement, maintenance, and compliance data. The challenge is that those data points are often reviewed separately. Analytics can help connect them and identify patterns that may be difficult to recognize through traditional supplier monitoring.
In supplier governance, for example, a predictive model could look beyond whether a supplier is currently delivering on time. It could evaluate changes in lead times, delivery variability, recurring quality issues, capacity indicators, sub-tier dependencies, corrective actions, and other signals that together may indicate that the supplier’s risk profile is changing.
AI can also support documentation and compliance monitoring. Aerospace supply chains generate large volumes of certificates, inspection records, purchase documentation, material records, and other technical information. AI-assisted tools can help compare records, identify missing or inconsistent information, flag unusual patterns, and prioritize documents that require further review.
That can also contribute to counterfeit and unapproved-part detection. I would be cautious about saying that AI can determine whether a part is counterfeit on its own. A more realistic application is using it to identify anomalies, for example, inconsistencies between part information and supporting documentation, unusual supplier or transaction patterns, or records that differ from established historical patterns, and then directing those cases to qualified professionals for verification.
Predictive risk management is another promising area. Instead of relying only on lagging indicators such as a missed delivery or a major quality failure, organizations can use historical and current data to identify combinations of smaller signals that have preceded disruptions in the past. That can give teams additional time to investigate and, when necessary, begin mitigation earlier.
But this is also where companies need to be careful. AI is only as reliable as the data, assumptions, and controls behind it. Poor-quality or incomplete data can produce misleading conclusions, and models can generate false positives or fail to recognize risks that fall outside the patterns they were trained to identify. Explainability, cybersecurity, confidentiality, and appropriate validation are particularly important in aerospace.
Most importantly, AI should not become a substitute for engineering judgment, quality oversight, regulatory responsibility, or supplier knowledge. A model can identify that something looks unusual; it cannot automatically understand every technical or operational reason behind it.
For me, the real value of AI in aerospace supply chain management is not autonomous decision-making. It is helping experienced professionals find meaningful risk signals earlier, understand where to focus their attention, and make better-informed decisions before those risks become disruptions.
Building Targeted Supply Chain Resilience
When asked which supplier-development and strategic-sourcing practices have proven most effective for improving resilience without creating excessive cost, inventory, or administrative burden, Brunacio explained:
One of the most important lessons from my experience is that resilience does not mean adding inventory, suppliers, or controls everywhere. That can become expensive very quickly without necessarily addressing the areas of greatest risk.
I have found that the starting point should be criticality. Organizations need to understand which components and suppliers could create a disproportionate operational impact if something goes wrong. A component may have relatively low purchase value, for example, but still represent significant risk if it has a long qualification cycle, very few approved sources, or the potential to interrupt production or maintenance.
Once those priorities are clear, supplier development becomes much more targeted. Some of the most effective practices are also relatively straightforward: regular performance reviews, realistic capacity assessments, better demand visibility, clear performance indicators, structured corrective-action plans, and direct engagement with suppliers when performance begins to deteriorate.
I have also learned that supplier development works better when the relationship goes beyond simply measuring performance. If a supplier is struggling, the first question should not always be whether to replace them.
Sometimes the more effective solution is to understand the root cause, work through the recovery plan together, clarify future demand, address capacity or process constraints, and establish clear milestones for improvement.
Strategic sourcing should follow the same principle. Unit price is important, but it cannot be evaluated in isolation. Lead time, qualification requirements, source concentration, quality performance, logistics exposure, technical capability, and the realistic time required to recover from a disruption can materially change the true risk and cost of a sourcing decision.
Alternative sourcing can be valuable, particularly for highly critical components, but I do not believe every part requires a second or third supplier. In aerospace, qualifying additional sources can itself be expensive and time-consuming. The better approach is to understand where redundancy actually creates value and where other mitigation strategies may be more appropriate.
Cross-functional involvement is also important. Procurement may manage the commercial relationship, but engineering, quality, operations, and other functions can provide information that changes how a sourcing or supplier-development decision should be made. Bringing those perspectives together early can prevent organizations from investing resources in mitigation strategies that do not address the real constraint.
Ultimately, I think the objective should be targeted resilience rather than maximum redundancy. Invest the most attention and resources where the consequence of disruption is greatest, strengthen suppliers where development can meaningfully reduce risk, and make sourcing decisions based on total operational exposure rather than purchase price alone.
Future Goals For NASCII
When asked what success for NASCII would look like over the next several years, Brunacio said:
For me, success would be seeing NASCII become a practical framework that organizations across the aerospace ecosystem can adapt and use in the real world. I don’t want it to be just a framework that looks good on paper. I want to keep testing it, learning from people across the industry, and improving it based on what actually works.
Over the next few years, I would like to see more consistency in the way we look at supplier risk. Every company will have its own processes, of course, but there are basic questions that we should be getting better at answering: Where are our biggest dependencies? Which suppliers or components would be the hardest to replace? Are we seeing problems early enough? And do the right people have the information they need to act?
I would also like to see the industry make real progress in traceability. When a critical component moves through several companies before reaching an aircraft, we should be able to trust its history and the documentation behind it. That sounds simple, but in such a complex supply chain, it is not always easy.
Collaboration will be important too. One thing I have learned from working in aerospace is that no company operates completely on its own. We may have different programs and different suppliers, but many of us ultimately depend on the same materials, specialized processes, manufacturing capabilities, and people.
I think there is a lot we can learn from each other without asking companies to share information that needs to remain confidential.
And I definitely want the results to be measurable. Are we catching supplier problems earlier? Are we understanding our sub-tier dependencies better? Are we finding documentation or quality issues before they become bigger problems? When something does go wrong, can we respond faster? To me, those kinds of improvements matter much more than simply saying that a new framework has been implemented.
There is also a very human side to this for me. We talk so much about suppliers, lead times, costs, capacity, and data that sometimes it is easy to forget what is at the end of the supply chain. These components eventually become part of an aircraft. There are pilots, crews, passengers, maintenance professionals, and many other people who depend on those aircraft being safe and reliable.
That is one of the reasons this work matters to me. If we can identify a risk earlier, improve the integrity and traceability of a critical component, or prevent a supply chain problem from becoming something bigger, there is a real purpose behind that.
So when I think about success for NASCII, I don’t think first about how many companies are using its name. I think about whether the work is actually helping people make better decisions, protect critical components, and ultimately contribute to safer and more reliable aviation. That would be meaningful to me.
The Human Side Of Aerospace
When invited to discuss another topic, Brunacio concluded:
One thing I would add is that I think supply chain professionals sometimes underestimate the impact of the work we do.
Early in my career, I looked at supply chain mostly through the traditional lens of purchasing, delivery, cost, and supplier performance. As I became more involved with critical aerospace components and supplier recovery situations, my perspective changed. I started to understand how decisions that may seem very operational can eventually affect production, maintenance, aircraft availability, and the people who depend on those aircraft.
That is also why I became so interested in prevention. Solving a major supplier problem is important, but if we can recognize the warning signs earlier and prevent that problem from becoming critical in the first place, that is even more valuable.
I also believe we need to keep bringing different perspectives into these conversations. Supply chain professionals, engineers, quality teams, maintenance organizations, researchers, technology specialists, and suppliers all see different parts of the same problem. Some of the best solutions can come from connecting those perspectives rather than looking at the supply chain from only one function.
That is the direction I want to continue pursuing with NASCII, learning from others, testing ideas in the real world, and contributing what I have learned from my own experience.
At the end of the day, aerospace is about people. Behind every component, every supplier, and every aircraft are people who design it, build it, maintain it, fly it, and trust it. If my work can contribute in some way to making that system stronger, safer, and more reliable, that is something I am very proud to work toward.
