How can aerospace and defense engineers improve productivity?
The aerospace and defense industry continues to develop some of the world’s most complex products while adhering to stringent regulations and rigorous certification standards. Moreover, technological advancements have created exciting opportunities for innovation, such as greater sustainability and automation. However, this also drives requirements for even more integrated systems of mechanical components, electronics, and software. This adds exponential levels of complexity as the thousands of components now have tens of thousands of interfaces. Consequently, engineers must manage, verify, and validate, all of this, which consuming valuable time. Unfortunately, engineers regularly lose productivity to non-value-add tasks that rob them of their ability to innovate and focus on these unique issues, threatening their company’s ability to compete, differentiate, and grow. Imagine the potential of identifying and removing the most common non-value-add activities engineers face and empowering them to focus on more critical tasks.
This research examines how engineers at aerospace and defense companies spend their time, where they lose productivity, and the impact on the business. It then identifies solutions and approaches to reduce time wasters.
Please enjoy the summary* below. For the full research, please visit our sponsor Siemens (registration required).
For related research, read The Business Value of Reducing Engineering Time Wasters for a look at this research across all industries.
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Table of Contents
- Executive Summary
- Product Development is Critical to Business Strategies
- The Time Wasters
- Implications of Time Wasters to the Business
- A Solution to Avoid Time Wasters
- Business Value from PLM
- Extending PLM Use Results in Greater Satisfaction
- How Companies Implement PLM
- Additional Values Due to the Cloud
- Conclusions
- Recommendations
- About the Research
- Acknowledgments
Executive Summary
Engineers Impact Business Success
Success at aerospace and defense companies relies on exceptional engineering. Engineers are crucial to ensuring integrated systems function as intended and will pass certification. Their design decisions directly impact sustainability goals, cost targets, and regulatory and safety requirements. Therefore, empowering engineers is key to the successful execution of business strategies.
Too Many Time Wasters
Unfortunately, engineers report spending too much time on non-value-added work with too many interruptions, taking them away from critical innovation work. Furthermore, 85% of surveyed aerospace and defense companies say this loss in engineering productivity comes at a significant business cost due to missed deadlines, higher costs, less innovation, and poor quality. One way to overcome productivity losses is to manage product data better and make it accessible to those who need it, when they need it.
Reclaiming Wasted Time
This report identifies substantial engineering time wasters in the aerospace and defense industry. It explores how companies of all sizes, including OEMs and suppliers, reclaim lost time by examining the use and value of PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) solutions to centralize data across multiple domains, manage processes, and collaborate better. Incidentally, PLM users reported fewer changes due to outdated information and errors, significantly reducing non-value-added work and shortening development times. This report also examines how companies select and use PLM solutions, including cloud-based implementations.
The Time Wasters
What Slows Engineers Down?
The graph identifies the top engineering time wasters aerospace and defense companies face. The findings highlight how much they waste on non-value-added work. Consequently, they need better ways to automate tedious tasks, especially those associated with compliance documentation, so they can focus more energy on adding value. Another top-ranking time waster, too many manual processes/ bottlenecks, emphasizes this further.
Interruptions
Similarly, constant interruptions to answer questions, share data, and provide updates also slow engineers down. These interruptions break an engineer’s train of thought and distract them from their work. Yet, engineers still need convenient ways to easily exchange data with suppliers, OEMs, and engineers across domains to prevent working with outdated data.
Limited Reuse
Interconnected systems of mechanical components, electronics, and software are incredibly complex. If engineers can leverage compliant, proven, and tested subsystems and components, they will save time, reduce the risk of errors, and spend less effort on new certifications. However, the number of components across multiple engineering domains and suppliers makes it very difficult to find needed data, and searching for it wastes valuable time. To avoid these issues, engineers need suitable methods for finding what they need.
Lack of Traceability
Changes to complex, interconnected systems can require significant effort without easy methods for identifying the change’s impacts. Traceability makes this possible. Traceability also makes compliance management significantly easier. It makes it possible to determine what’s been verified and tested to meet regulatory and safety requirements. Then when tests fail, you can quickly identify what’s impacted by the failure. Consequently, traceability can significantly reduce the manual burden of certification. Unfortunately, the manual document-driven processes common at aerospace and defense companies substantially limit traceability.
Conclusions
ConclusionsReclaiming Lost Time
Aerospace and defense companies prioritize their future growth and sustained success on winning in the marketplace with better, differentiated offerings. To support this, they can significantly boost their product development capabilities by eliminating time wasters that consume engineers’ valuable time.
Aerospace and defense manufacturers find that PLM can empower their engineers to innovate by significantly reducing engineers’ time on non-value-added tasks. As a result, they can enjoy a competitive advantage. In addition, technological advances, such as cloud-based offerings, can reduce implementation time, cost, and difficulty, making PLM more accessible.
*This summary is an abbreviated version of the research and does not contain the full content. For the full research, please visit our sponsor Siemens (registration required).
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