Industry-Proven Solutions for the Aerospace and Defense Industry
CIMdata, Inc., the leading global PLM strategic management consulting and research firm, announces the release of a White Paper focused on global supply chain collaboration in the Aerospace & Defense (A&D) industry. Large aircraft manufacturers are moving to model-based processes for collaboration with their partners and suppliers. CIMdata’s work with the Aerospace and Defense PLM Action Group highlights the challenges these companies face and their requirements for an improved solution. Siemens Digital Industries Software’s collaboration and supplier management solution looks to address those concerns.
Collaboration among Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and their product design and manufacturing engineering partners and suppliers is critical to executing any major aerospace and defense program. In the past, product developers have been seriously hindered by relying on traditional, document-based development processes. One of their major business challenges is to achieve OEM and supply chain collaboration through the bidirectional exchange of Technical Data Packages (TDPs)[1] using digital tools and model-based processes. However, there are many facets to this challenge that must be addressed.
The Aerospace & Defense PLM Action Group’s Global Collaboration team has published a position paper on their view of the future desired state for a collaborative supply chain environment: It predicates a synchronous collaboration solution that works in parallel with industry CAD and data interchange standards to ensure control and bi-directional communication and sharing. The solution should improve interoperability between collaboration communities while minimizing manual intervention. It should provide a non-propriety data format to allow system- and solution-agnostic movement of data between organizations irrespective of the end point solutions used to create and maintain the data being collaborated.
In response to this vision, Siemens Digital Industries Software provides a model-based digital thread approach built on its Xcelerator portfolio.
Dr. Ken Versprille, CIMdata Executive Consultant, noted, “Supply chain issues are at the forefront of today’s interactions in many industries. The Aerospace & Defense industry is no different. Given the size and complexity of their products, effectively managing the design and production of aircraft is critical.”
The CIMdata White Paper on Supplier Collaboration is available at: www.CIMdata.com.
[1] This information may include, but is not limited to, engineering data, purchasing data, manufacturing data, certification data, test data, service data, etc. Some examples of these types of data are design definition, test reports, administrative agreements, installation instructions, component maintenance manuals, etc.