How can A&D manufacturers extend the value of PLM into manufacturing? Aerospace and Defense companies face growing backlogs that hamper revenue and profitability. This buyer’s guide outlines high-level requirements for A&D companies to select PLM solutions that accelerate production without compromising quality, efficiency, or compliance.
Please enjoy the summary* below. For the full research, please visit our sponsor, PTC (registration required).
This research is also available in French, German, and Italian.
Table of Contents
- Choose PLM to Drive A&D Profits
- Introducing the Buyer’s Guide
- Design Engineering
- Production Planning
- Shop Floor Communication
- Supply Chain Enablement
- Sustainment Readiness
- Considerations for Implementation and Adoption
- Vendor Considerations
- Special Considerations
- Recommendations and Next Steps
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
Choose PLM to Drive A&D Profits
Profiting in A&D is Multifaceted
A&D (Aerospace and Defense) companies must excel in various areas to drive success and profitability. They need to develop the right capabilities to win orders, engineer equipment to meet performance requirements, deliver quickly to fulfill backlogs, and sustain equipment to profit from the service lifecycle. Today’s A&D companies must be able to do each of these things well despite increased complexity, accelerating demand for rapid innovation, and dynamic supply chain challenges.
Focus on Delivery
One of the biggest things holding A&D companies’ revenue back is delivering against growing backlogs. Whether a company is a prime or in the supply chain, and whether they are equipping the war fighter or helping commercial airlines scale to meet growing demand, rapid time to delivery is essential. The challenge is to turn backlog into realized revenue by increasing production speed, throughput, and capacity without compromising quality, compliance, and cost.
Enable Profitability in A&D
PLM can help by enabling innovation, systems design, and digital continuity across the program and equipment lifecycle. This buyer’s guide examines the key things to look for in a PLM system to improve production speed and capacity, recognizing PLM’s role as an essential part of the enabling A&D systems ecosystem. Let’s take a look.
Introducing the Buyer’s Guide
Purpose of Our Buyer’s Guides
Tech-Clarity’s buyer’s guides are designed to help manufacturers frame their software selection strategies by focusing on what drives business success. They aren’t intended to provide exhaustive lists of requirements. Instead, they identify key decision criteria that can make the difference between success and failure.
Scope of this Guide
This guide focuses on helping A&D companies select a PLM system to improve delivery speed and capacity. It includes bringing innovation and new capabilities to market faster, confidently introducing change across the enterprise, efficiently scaling production capabilities, and accurately creating service and sustainment information to support delivery. The requirements focus on what PLM can do at the intersection of engineering, manufacturing, and readiness for sustainment as a part of a broader enterprise systems ecosystem.
The guide covers key solution areas that A&D companies must improve and optimize to drive profitability:
- Design engineering
- Production planning
- Shop floor communication
- Supply chain enablement
- Sustainment readiness
The advice goes beyond software requirements, including requirements for implementation and adoption and what to look for in a solution provider. In addition, it covers special considerations that today’s A&D companies must consider when choosing a solution, including managing change across the lifecycle and applications, ALM-PLM integration, enabling MBD, and AI readiness.
The following processes are related but not specifically in scope for
- Requirements management
- Engineering / MBSE
- Manufacturing execution and tracking
- Service and sustainment execution
Recommendations and Next Steps
Need to Speed and Scale Quickly
A&D companies have a significant opportunity to accelerate revenue by increasing their delivery speed. Companies that can deliver against their current order backlogs can not only drive higher revenue today but also put themselves in a better strategic position to replace aging fleets and support growth in new geographies.
Things to Look For
In order to take advantage of this opportunity, A&D companies have to manage significant complexity that is only growing with the increase in autonomous, electric, hybrid, and hydrogen-fueled equipment. These companies can leverage PLM to increase speed and grow capacity by taking a more integrated, MBE approach. PLM should be able to support this as not only the authoritative source of information, but also as the process orchestrator that integrates information across the A&D ecosystem.
Get Started or Continue Your Journey
For A&D companies to be successful, they must select not only the right solution to integrate their digital threads but also choose an offering that helps them implement and adopt new processes. Further, they must align themselves with the right partner to enable their transformation today and into the future. The high-level requirements in this guide can serve as a foundation for more detailed requirements to determine the right solution.
*This summary is an abbreviated version of the ebook and does not contain the full content. For the full report, please visit our sponsor PTC.
If you have difficulty obtaining a copy of the research, please contact us.
