Who should have authority to approve scrap, repair, or concession dispositions?

It should be approved by the roles formally designated in your quality system and product governance process, not by whoever discovered the issue or whoever is under the most schedule pressure.

In practice, that usually means:

• Scrap: often approved by authorized quality personnel, and sometimes operations leadership as well, if the part is clearly non-recoverable and local procedures allow it.
• Repair: typically requires engineering authority in addition to quality review, because repair changes how the product is brought back to an acceptable condition and may affect form, fit, function, reliability, or future maintenance.
• Concession or use-as-is: usually requires a formal review board or delegated authority that includes quality and engineering, and may also require customer or design authority approval depending on contract terms, product criticality, and whether the nonconformance affects requirements.

The short answer is: authority should follow documented delegation, competency, and risk classification, with clear evidence of who approved what and under which procedure.

What should not happen

Operators, supervisors, planners, or buyers should not independently approve repair or concession dispositions unless your controlled procedures explicitly delegate that authority and the individuals are qualified to exercise it. In regulated environments, informal approvals create obvious traceability and change control problems, and they can invalidate downstream assumptions in inspection, genealogy, costing, and customer reporting.

It is also risky to assume that scrap is always a simple local decision. Scrap may trigger material accountability, customer notification, supplier recovery, serialized asset updates, or impact analysis for work orders already linked in MES, ERP, PLM, or QMS.

What determines the right approval model

• Product criticality and safety significance
• Whether the disposition changes design intent or process intent
• Customer, contract, or design authority requirements
• Internal delegation rules in the QMS
• Competency and training records for approvers
• Whether the item is serialized, traceable, or already installed in a higher-level assembly
• System capability to enforce routing, signatures, and evidence retention

If these conditions are not well defined, approval authority becomes inconsistent across shifts and sites. That is a governance problem, not just a workflow problem.

Brownfield system reality

In many plants, the actual approval path is split across QMS, MES, ERP, email, and engineering records. That is common, but it increases the chance of mismatched statuses, missing signatures, and weak evidence trails. A digital workflow can help enforce role-based approvals, but only if master data, role mapping, and system integrations are reliable.

Full replacement of legacy quality or execution systems is often not the practical answer. In regulated, long-lifecycle environments, replacement can fail because of validation effort, qualification burden, downtime risk, integration complexity, and the need to preserve historical traceability. More often, the workable approach is to tighten disposition authority rules and connect existing systems well enough that approvals, records, and status changes remain synchronized.

Practical rule

If a disposition could affect product acceptance, configuration, traceability, customer obligations, or future airworthiness or serviceability decisions, approval should sit with authorized quality and engineering functions under controlled procedures, with escalation to customer or design authority where required.

If your process cannot show who had authority, what evidence they reviewed, and which system became the system of record, then the approval model is not mature enough yet.