DEFENCE Future-proofing A&D manufacturing for Industry 4.0 Evan Butler-Jones, Director, Defence Product Line, Aerospace & Defence Business Unit at IFS, provides a checklist for aerospace and defence manufacturers to ensure they take advantage of the benefits of Industry 4.0. The benefits of Industry 4.0 for A&D manufacturers are enormous but involve critical decisions on digital investments and an increasingly cyberaware ecosystem. A&D manufacturers can ensure they extract value from Industry 4.0 to stay competitive into the next decade and keep their business processes connected, configurable, intelligent and secure, but that means getting the building blocks in place with a forward-looking software platform for such futureproofing initiatives. In a recent report Deloitte defines ‘Aerospace & Defence 4.0’ as the application of Industry 4.0 technologies for developing new cost-effective products and services, making existing products smarter using sensors and connectivity, and leveraging advanced manufacturing processes. A&D manufacturer BAE Systems has been using these principles in its New Product and Process Development Centre since 2017, where 3D printing and virtual reality technology are used to reduce costs and speed up manufacturing processes for combat aircraft. Still, this may seem like a daunting task for many A&D manufacturers, particularly those tier two and three companies that play a vital supporting role in the manufacturing ecosystem but lack large manpower and monetary resources. This really doesn’t need to be the case. In fact, IFS customer TESTFUCHS is already seeing the real benefits of a dedicated digital twin 14
approach for the ground support assets and test equipment it manufacturers, implemented as part of a companywide push for digital transformation. Here I pinpoint four key areas, as well as some helpful feedback we hear across our A&D manufacturing client base, all of which highlight where the right software can help A&D manufacturers deliver on an Aerospace & Defence 4.0 strategy and futureproof their business. 1. Connectivity – “Connecting outside our four factory walls is as important as any new feature we get in software”. The significance of the digital thread as a communication network is huge in scale and consequently in importance. It enables a connected flow of data and an integrated view of an asset across its lifetime through various isolated functional perspectives, through multiple factory walls. According to LNS Research, the digital thread can increase supply chain efficiency by 16% and reduce the time required to take a product to market. Alongside these digital initiatives, more manufacturers have realised revenue gains by extending asset management into the field to supply and service customer assets. This brings in service-based contracts with Service Level Agreements (SLAs) which must be met, and the best way to manage these contracts is by providing a suitable mobile platform for field workers and data feedback from the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). This means A&D manufacturers need
Evan Butler-Jones, Director, Defence Product Line, Aerospace & Defence Business Unit at IFS to rely heavily on their supporting enterprise software in order to provide this level of connectivity. Open frameworks, instant collaboration The right software tools can help them connect to this increasingly digital supply chain ecosystem by offering seamless interoperability with other solutions, either through an open integration framework or through pre-built solutions which meet specific government or industry integration standards. With servitisation-based business models becoming commonplace among A&D manufacturers, Line of Defence
