A contractual event held for each deliverable copy1 of a CI to establish concurrence between supplier and customer that the subject CI meets (or acceptably deviates from) the previously established Acceptance Requirements for its correct manufacture. An acceptance event is associated with each Serial Number or Lot Number, depending on how the item is procured and manufactured.
In this context, “acceptably deviates from” means that, during manufacture and acceptance activities, failures to meet the previously agreed-upon acceptance requirements (and other manufacturing non-conformances) have been reviewed by the customer (or duly authorized representative) and have been either approved for use “as-is”, repaired, or reworked to a degree acceptable for the customer’s intended use. See also Material Review Board, scrap and limited use.
This notion of (in effect) over-riding the acceptance criteria for one or more specific S/N or L/N means that trying to use Qualification-phase requirements data structures and management techniques is, at best, silly. An entirely different set of practices applies during Acceptance. Furthermore, the overall process is designed to permit the existence of more than one design to meet the requirements of a given CI. The process was designed that way on purpose to encourage competition on performance, quality, and cost.
Acceptance differs from Qualification in that it establishes a production End Item as meeting the criteria established by its design, whereas Qualification establishes a design as meeting the criteria for development of its design. Strictly speaking, the deliverable item should not be marked with its Part Number until all the criteria have been met, but that’s not usually how things work. My standard practice in this regard is to remind people that “we qualify the design and we accept the part”, but they usually don’t listen.
Footnotes- The software guys would call this an “instance”. The production process would be called “instantiation”. Be careful around software guys: they mean well, but they use odd words in strange ways.[↩]