With a constant focus on delivering the highest levels of quality and performance to its customers, NSE officially joined the Aero Excellence™ initiative in 2025, a structured program launched by GIFAS (French Aerospace Industries Association). This initiative reflects the Group’s ambition to strengthen the robustness of its processes, enhance supply chain reliability, and accelerate its continuous improvement efforts.
NSE GROUP
Aero Excellence: a new standard for the aerospace industry
The Aero Excellence initiative aims to raise the industrial maturity level of companies within the aerospace and defense sectors through a shared framework of best practices. It promotes the standardization of tools, methods, and terminology, fostering transparency, efficiency, and shared performance across clients and suppliers.
Ultimately, Aero Excellence will replace the system audits currently used by major contractors (such as the IPCA – Industrial Process Control Assessment) while retaining product-specific audits. It is fully aligned with the AirCyber initiative, which evaluates industrial performance through the lens of cybersecurity, sharing the same goal: strengthening reliability and trust across the supply chain.
A proactive and collaborative approach
NSE chose to engage voluntarily in the Aero Excellence initiative, anticipating future requirements from major industry players and contractors. The company has already launched the first phase of the project, working alongside a GIFAS-certified expert to ensure proper implementation of the methodology and to prepare for an official assessment in 2026.
The program is built on a self-assessment platform that allows companies to measure their progress across different maturity levels — from Bronze (800 criteria), reflecting compliance with the fundamentals, to Gold (2000 criteria), representing industrial and organizational excellence.
The kick-off meeting took place on May 16, 2025, and the first self-assessment is scheduled for November 2025, with the goal of obtaining an initial Aero Excellence label in the second half of 2026.
evaluation pillars aligned with customer priorities
The Aero Excellence framework evaluates performance across six strategic domains directly linked to client expectations for reliability and excellence:
- Governance – ensuring clear and well-understood management and direction.
- Environment – encompassing all initiatives that address environmental impact.
- Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) – reflecting ethical and sustainable ambitions.
- Planning and logistics – enhancing delivery reliability and supply efficiency.
- Supplier management – ensuring fair evaluation of dependencies and partnerships.
- Operational excellence and industrialization – guaranteeing performance and quality across design, industrialization, production, and maintenance processes.
Through Aero Excellence, NSE continues to strengthen its culture of continuous improvement and reaffirms its commitment to offering customers a partnership founded on transparency, rigor, and reliability. This initiative reinforces the Group’s strategic vision: to build long-term partnerships, combining innovation, quality, and responsibility, while meeting the highest standards of the aerospace and defense industries.
