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Aerospace and Defense

Bridge the gap between the virtual and real world to accelerate from concept to operations.

 

Across the Aerospace & Defense industry, rising customer expectations (lower costs, higher standards and increase capabilities) along with growing program complexity make it more challenging to compete.

As systems become more complex to design, build and deliver, OEMs and suppliers need to accelerate innovation, drive efficiencies and move to the factory of the future to allow for greater agility on production rate. This requires a new way to conceptualize, design, manufacture, test, certify and sustain new air and space vehicles.

Airframe Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs)

Aerospace Suppliers

Aerospace Propulsion

Defense

Space

Addressing the business challenges of the Aerospace & Defense Industry

Prospects for Aerospace & Defense companies appear bright with the continued growth of commercial aviation and the upturn of defense spending. Leaders must transform to navigate the landscape as new players use technology and non-traditional approaches to disrupt the mature aerospace industry.

INDUSTRY CHALLENGES

Disruptive Innovation

Accelerate from concept to delivery from years to months.

Minimize the risks of innovation

New technologies are accelerating innovation while significantly dropping the barriers to entry into the aerospace market. New startups are reinventing short-range transportation while regional aircraft makers are adding more pressure to the broader commercial aviation market.

Companies can more rapidly integrate new technologies like additive manufacturing and robotics into production while transforming their innovation process, by leveraging virtual environments, digital continuity, and simulation.

Lower risks with production ready innovation.

  • Leverage the latest disruptive technologies like robotics, additive manufacturing, reverse engineering, composites and virtual reality.
  • Visualize and simulate new concepts without the need for costly prototypes or physical testing.
  • Connect with experts and authorities to accelerate the certification of new design and methods.
  • Prototype new concepts, methods and processes rapidly without significant capital investment.
  • Leverage innovation campuses to partner with academia to access to latest methods and equip the next generation workforce.

Accelerate innovation through collaboration

To accelerate innovation, companies must bring together people from various functions to seamlessly work together and leverage the latest technologies in material science, automation, virtual technologies and simulation. This allows for game-changing innovation while dramatically reducing the risk.

The 3DEXPERIENCE platform allows teams to leverage a unified virtual environment  to seamlessly collaborate across the globe and integrate new technologies into their system of work. Companies can explore and simulate a 1000 times the concepts with the same resources as today and optimize concepts to deliver against key requirements with ensuring they can deliver on-time, on-target and on-cost in record time compared to the time normally needs for concept development.

Design to Cost

Accelerate program maturity from concept to manufacturing while driving 40-60% of cost out.

Drive out cost despite growing complexity

Aerospace companies must integrate new technologies into ever increasing complex aircraft that can meet passenger demands, and operator cost and uptime targets. If not, they risk losing market share from more agile competitors.

To drive down costs, they must find efficiencies in how they conceptualize, design, manufacture, test, certify and support new aircraft. This requires significant process improvements that transform their ability to deliver on schedule, on cost, and on specification.

Transforming aerospace programs to drive out cost:

  • Work concurrently in context of a full system digital mockup providing a single version of the truth.
  • Continuously monitor schedule, budget, resource allocation and deliverables across the supply chain.
  • Maintain strong program control to stay on time, on cost and on spec while avoiding contract penalties.
  • Optimize the design of components, subsystems and systems while ensuring proper integration to drive out costs.

Accelerate program maturity while driving down cost

Companies must significantly increase the degree of integration to develop more advanced, complex and capable aircraft that can compete in the market. They must seamlessly collaborate across functions, organizations and geographies to keep the program on track.

To integrate this effort, the 3DEXPERIENCE platform goes beyond the traditional digital mockup (DMU) by providing a System Digital Mockup (S-DMU). This delivers insights and a common reference across the development process to optimize design efforts and drive down costs between 40 and 60 percent.

Agility of Rate

On target the first time every time from initial delivery, to ramp up and adjustments for ongoing production.

Backlogs in aerospace production

Over the next decades, airline fleet modernization and aircraft retirements will add to current backlog of aviation orders. In the past, companies adjusted production rates by adding or removing labor, creating cost and quality issues. Automation can help, but companies need flexibility to achieve the right rate.

Companies must dynamically match production with demand while improving quality, lowering costs, ensuring worker saftefy and delivering on time. Instead of treating design, planning, validation and execution as silos, companies must integrate horizontally and vertically to compete in today’s market.

Increase manufacturing agility:

  • Improve decision-making to stay on budget and on time through 360 degree planning, simulation, and real-time insights.
  • Improve manufacturing quality through unified change management, full supplier traceability, and real-time tracking of quality issues.
  • Optimized planning and execution through real-time visibility across the supply chain to assess performance and rapidly implement corrective actions.
  • Deliver right-the-first-time through virtual assembly and manufacturing planning.

Digital continuity throughout production

Agile companies can eliminate costs, quality issues, and waste virtually before production starts. They can anticipate potential issues before they occur, simulate multiple scenarios rapidly to determine the best course of action, and have the flexibility in their production systems and methods to meet new actual market demand.

The 3DEXPERIENCE platform provides the digital continuity needed to meet production rate and quality goals. It connects planning to the shop floor through a “digital twin” to anticipate issues, and take proactive actions to accelerate production rates.

Supply Chain Reinvention

Drive integration to improve visibility, on-time delivery and first-time quality.

Increase pressure on suppliers

Today, supplier-created parts and content represents 50%-60% of the value of an aerospace system. Relentless price pressures and the expected doubling of air traffic over the next 20 years are compelling Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and tier 1 suppliers to reinvent the way they work with the supply chain. The new model requires a closer partnership to improve visibility, on-time delivery and first-time quality.

Suppliers understand the need to provide better visibility to their OEM customers. To do so, they must adopt tighter integration and work seamlessly as an extension of the OEM. Those suppliers who choose to continue business as usual, and do not adapt their business model, risk losing business. Aircraft manufacturers who can’t find strong suppliers may seek to acquire and “insource” high value suppliers. The entire supply chain is undergoing a shift to effectively compete in the aerospace market.

Transform the entire supply chain to optimize operations by:

  • Connect across organizations, functions, and companies worldwide to using a single System Digital Mockup (S-DMU) to drive down development costs by as much as 60 percent.
  • Increase on-time delivery through shared development of strategic plans, inventory targets and resource plans.
  • Avoid potential manufacturing issues through real-time alerts of plant disruptions, bottlenecks and the root cause of production delays across the entire supply chain.
  • Increase profitability by creating and comparing multiple scenarios quickly and accurately to find the most profitable outcome.

Improving OEM and Supplier Collaboration

Manufacturers, like Boeing, Airbus, Dassault Aviation, Turkish Aerospace Industries, and other leading OEMs, are now leveraging new software platforms to work collaboratively with suppliers to design new platforms, update existing aircraft programs, modernize production systems and deploy new services. This transformation effort significantly improves the agility of the entire supply chain, improves first time quality and significantly lowers costs.

The 3DEXPERIENCE platform provides the digital continuity to improve the connection between OEMs and suppliers. This results in improved visibility, on-time delivery and first time quality. Suppliers can interact seamlessly with OEMs to design components, integrate systems and keep manufacturing activities in sync to avoid potential slowdowns of production.

On-demand Certification

Certify on-time, cut certification costs and improve trust with suppliers and aviation authorities.

Reinvent the certification process

New innovations can improve the experience and profitability of new aircraft programs, but also significantly increase the complexity to certify aircraft and ensure passenger safety. Missing a certification window can drive costs out of control and at worst, kill a program.

Today’s certification process is highly fragmented and lacks a single version of the truth between multiple departments, aviation authorities, and operators. This results in an inefficient and costly process leading to signficant delays and rework.

Achieve certification on time:

  • Stay abreast and comply with constantly changing regulations to avoid audits.
  • Assess certification status across the entire value chain and proactively drive execution.
  • Streamline compilation of submissions while ensuring full traceability.
  • Foresee quality issues virtually before the start of production.

A single platform to manage certification

The 3DEXPERIENCE platform allows aerospace companies to manage the regulatory compliancy process through a single platform. Seamless integration of engineering changes in real time and access to validated models that replace physical testing provide full traceability needed to create certification package on demand and manage audits.

Virtual testing and strong certification management can help ensure companies deliver on time while controlling the costs of verification and validation.