e-business Transformation to an Aerospace & Defense Digital Manufacturing Enterprise

Pat Toole, Jr., IBM General Manager, Product Design Management

Joel Lemke, Chief Executive Officer, ENOVIA Corp.

The aerospace & defense industry has encountered dramatic change in the last decade, which is forcing firms to adapt to the new realities of the 21 ^st century. There are fewer defense contracts with an increasing emphasis on affordability demanded by government procurement organizations. Commercial airlines are also applying pressure to OEM’s and their supply chains to cut costs, improve cycle times, boost productivity, and improve quality. Increasingly, senior level aerospace & defense executives recognize that product development and supply chain collaboration are the key drivers of differentiation for their firms. A major industry study by Deloitte Consulting projects that share of revenue from new product introductions will rise by more than 65% for A&D prime contractors and by more than 40% for suppliers over the next three years. Another major study of supply chains by PRTM identified that aerospace & defense firms have 40% higher costs for supply chain management than commercial electronics companies as a percentage of sales. To exploit the opportunities by developing synergies between product development and supply chain collaboration, e-business will shape the ability of aerospace & defense firms to successfully differentiate themselves as global leaders in the 21 ^st century.

Let’s start by trying to define e-business. It is a phrase we see and hear many times everyday: in the general, financial and industry press, in in-flight magazines, on radio and TV and, of course, in board rooms, conference rooms, factories and business offices around the world.

For an ever-increasing number of aerospace & defense companies, e-business has become "the next big thing." Senior business executives are quickly learning that regardless of the size of their company or the markets in which they compete, they must ensure for themselves a working knowledge of e-business: what is it, and what are the technological and economic forces behind the e-business explosion. Armed with this information, they can assess the value of e-business to the strategic future of their companies.

Defining e-business and the Digital Manufacturing Enterprise

The most common conception people have of e-business is buying or selling over the Internet. While this clearly is an important part of e-business, it is only one aspect of it, and more appropriately is referred to as "e-commerce." There have been some initial examples of spare parts applications in the aerospace & defense industry, but true e-business is much more than just having a Web site selling parts. And it’s more than the effort aerospace & defense firms might take to move their operations to a "paperless environment," although that, too, is an aspect of e-business.

For aerospace & defense firms, e-business means:

Exploiting the combined power of the Internet and information technology to fundamentally transform key business strategies and processes to deliver value to their customers.

For aerospace & defense companies to successfully transform their strategies and processes means they must become digital enterprises – using CAx, VPDM, ERP, SCM, communications, and other digital-based technologies to conceive of, design, build, market, sell, and support the most innovative, highest quality, affordable, and maintainable products for their customers. e-business is a complementary concept to creating the lean enterprise in aerospace & defense firms. Lean manufacturing in aerospace & defense initially focused on the shop floor with an emphasis on reducing inventory and eliminating waste. e-business builds on the waste elimination concepts by reducing cycle time through digital speed and by making relevant information available to partners, suppliers, and customers to drive efficiency throughout the entire value chain.

This succinct digital enterprise definition applies to all aerospace & defense manufacturers, regardless of size, location or industry. Even smaller suppliers – those who have long thought of their marketplace as being "around the corner" – are fending off competitors from around the world. They are quickly discovering that they cannot continue to use the traditional business models that have sustained them to date.

Business is Changing – The Digital Economy

Remaining viable means evolving the business – and the business model. That requires real time information sharing and management processes to leverage this information. Such new models, systems and processes have been available only for the past few years, as advances in technology finally enabled the merger of computing and communications to create what is often called a networked economy, or a networked society.

It also has brought about a revolution that involves nothing less than the rise of a new economy – a digital economy – and a new global medium that will be the single most important driver of business, economic and social change. In the economy of the 21st century, this new technology structure, and the new business model that it enables, will underpin almost every nation’s ability to drive production, productivity, profitable growth, and ensure the security and prosperity of its citizens. In recent testimony to the subcommittee on Science, Technology and Space, Gary Bachula, Secretary for the Technology Administration put it this way: "More than ever before, technological leadership is vital to the national interest. Our ability to harness the power and promise of leading-edge advances in technology will determine, in large measure, our national prosperity, security and global influence. Technology underpins our fastest growing industries and provides the tools needed to compete in every business today. "

While the e-business explosion may be looked on as a matter of survival, it also clearly is a matter of enormous opportunity for businesses, as well as their employees, suppliers and customers. The more fundamental the transformation, the greater the opportunity and potential return. If e-business truly is "the next big thing," "big" may be an understatement. Estimates are that between 1998 and 2003, Internet commerce in general - which barely existed just a few years ago -- will increase at a compound growth rate of 92 percent, from about $50 billion to $1.3 trillion. The business-to-business segment will dwarf the business-to-consumer segment, growing at an 86 percent CGR, from $36 billion in 1998 to more than $1 trillion in 2003. The number of Web users will grow from 142 million to more than 500 million in the same period.

The digital economy changes the competitive landscape for aerospace & defense companies. Companies that accept and adapt to this new paradigm will have a significant advantage over those that don’t. Aerospace & defense firms that understand the digital economy and how business will be conducted and act upon this insight will have a better chance to compete for the finite number of customer dollars. These companies will truly be digital enterprises.

Where Are We Today?

The underpinning of the new networked, digital economy is information in digital form. With the growth of the digital economy comes even more growth in the amount of digital information required to support it. The development of increasingly sophisticated computer applications has been both a blessing and a burden. It has been a blessing by enabling corporations to dramatically improve their productivity. However, it has been a burden by generating more information than companies can effectively utilize.

Computer-aided design (CAD) systems have been generally accepted as an effective means for creating and documenting product designs. As these systems have become easier to use, more people have been able to generate more information – to the extent that we need even more and different systems to manage and make sense of all of the information being generated. Compounding the issue is that each piece of information is related to one or more pieces. Managing the myriad of relationships and dependencies has becomes complex.

Buried within this network is more than just mere information. There is knowledge. The difference is that knowledge is information that is organized, evaluated, valuable and available to the appropriate people to leverage and exploit. For example, knowledge of best design practices, of product performance characteristics, of product maintainability, and knowledge of many other aspects of designing and building the product is crucial for any manufacturing organization. Just as organizations optimally use physical capital such as plants and equipment, they must also use the intellectual capital embedded within their people, systems, and processes. Unfortunately, this knowledge is viewed simply as information – stored away in undocumented processes, in inaccessible systems and databases, and in the minds of employees. Many organizations take for granted the processes and systems used in support of designing and manufacturing a product. These processes and systems have evolved over decades and were established before information was digital. In fact, most of today’s corporations are drowning in information, yet starving for knowledge. A CEO once remarked, "If our company knew what we knew, we’d be three times more profitable."

If aerospace & defense design environments were in one building, companies might be able to get a handle on all of the digital information being generated as part of the product creation process. But aerospace & defense firms have global partnerships in which suppliers are given complete design and build responsibilities for entire sub-assemblies. They, in turn, distribute responsibility for sub-components to other suppliers that are located around the world. The result is a design process that is not tied to a single company, but distributed throughout an elaborate chain of participating companies, each of which must understand the overall product requirements and specifications, and also must understand their individual responsibility in the context of the whole product.

Within the complexity of this environment, companies are engaging in multiple initiatives to obtain competitive advantage. Most of these initiatives are focused on reducing costs and improving time to market. The proliferation of CAD systems is representative of companies’ focus on reducing costs through automation of tasks. Product data management systems (PDM) are also being rapidly accepted as an effective means for managing corporate design release processes and shortening engineering change cycles. The millions of dollars being spent on ERP systems illustrates the emphasis companies are placing on efficient operations. Utilization of these systems was once a competitive advantage; however, they have now become a competitive necessity.

Many aerospace & defense firms are focusing on cost reduction in the portion of the product development cycle that can have the biggest impact on competitiveness – the conceptual design stage! They are spending ten times more on operational efficiencies than what they are spending on conceptual design; yet the improvement in bottom line corporate performance – and competitiveness – is limited. Conservative estimates indicate that eighty to ninety percent of a product’s life cycle costs are committed during the conceptual design stage, where only a tiny percentage of those costs have been incurred. Furthermore, taking into account manufacturability and product function during conceptual design can result in up to a 5X cost reduction and 4X manufacturing cycle time reduction.

Unfortunately, traditional PDM systems do not effectively support the conceptual design stage. This is largely because PDM systems are designed to enforce structure – both in product data and in business processes. The conceptual design stage, however, is largely unstructured. Enforcing structure impedes creativity by forcing engineers to operate within the context of a rigid data management system, rather than in an environment in which they can be more productive.

Even without traditional PDM systems, many companies are still using product creation processes that were designed to operate on data in paper form, rather than on the digital data being generated by today’s applications. These processes limit engineers’ creativity by assuming that design activities should be conducted as they always have in the past. Many companies use advanced CAD systems to create complex geometry, but then communicate product information using two dimensional drawings, failing to exploit the wealth of product information embedded within the three-dimensional product representation. Unfortunately, this communication is often too late to have any significant impact on the product creation process. These processes do not facilitate creative exploration of alternative designs. Moreover, they encourage engineers to push ahead with a marginal design, since the time and effort required to refine the design is outweighed by time to market pressures. The result is costly if change is required, since it’s much more expensive to change a design late in the cycle than it is to change during the conceptual design stage.

Tremendous Opportunities Exist

And where does this leave most aerospace & defense firms? It leaves them with tremendous opportunities –opportunities to improve their product development processes and to increase their ability to compete as design and manufacturing enterprises in addition to the emerging area of after-delivery support. Digitization is enabling information to be extracted from legacy systems and processes so that aerospace & defense firms can really leverage it to improve their corporate bottom line. They are now able to extract and utilize the intellectual capital – knowledge if you will – that is buried within their company and employees. The Internet is shrinking time and space, and allowing OEM’s, prime contractors, and suppliers to conduct business as if they were physically located in the neighborhood. But how can aerospace & defense firms take advantage of this opportunity to increase their competitiveness? The answer is by adding value through innovation .

Innovate to Compete

Paul Cook, founder of Raychem, states, "In the final analysis, you can’t continue to reduce costs and grow." Certainly, low costs are a necessary business objective, but they cannot sustain a company over time. Similarly, being first to market presents business advantages, but only if the products being delivered are desired by customers. The danger facing an organization in focusing solely on operational issues is that the organization might achieve the most efficient and effective production processes, but will not have created competitive advantage. According to the GartnerGroup, the new competitive landscape requires that manufacturers deliver new products that allow them to expand their existing markets and even to create new markets. They do this only by designing, building and delivering new products that serve previously unmet needs in the marketplace. Design effectiveness is measured not by the number of engineering changes processed, but by the number of new profitable products introduced, the contribution of new products to total revenue, and by the number of new customers gained.

Because they focus on repeatability, operational efficiencies do not encourage innovation – in fact, they discourage any type of change whatsoever. Innovation relies on human creativity. Innovation requires an environment in which engineers can quickly and easily experiment with design alternatives. Innovation requires flexibility in the product creation process to introduce new concepts and technologies as they become available. Innovation requires an in-depth understanding of design decisions on product performance, manufacturability, and maintainability. For aerospace & defense firms to compete in the next millennium, they must adopt a product development process that facilitates and encourages innovation and effectively manages the entire lifecycle process which in this industry can be more than 30 years. When aerospace & defense firms can capture and leverage knowledge and more efficiently introduce innovative products into new markets, the product development process itself then becomes a competitive weapon. Furthermore, the companies in aerospace & defense that most effectively manage the entire product lifecycle process will be best positioned to succeed in the emerging maintenance, repair, and overhaul market.

The Digital Manufacturing Enterprise

An aerospace & defense digital manufacturing enterprise is a company that uses information technologies and the Internet, intranets or extranets and other technologies to conceive, design, build, market, sell, and support the most innovative, highest quality, affordable, and maintainable products on behalf of its customers. Within a digital enterprise, information becomes knowledge, supporting a product's entire life cycle, including design, development, procurement, tooling, engineering steps, maintenance and sales/marketing procedures. This knowledge is available to all participants in the product development cycle. Preferred parts information is available to designers so that decisions can be made to source parts from preferred suppliers without designing parts from scratch. All product designs and process steps are considered and evaluated in a concurrent effort that involves the key disciplines in the entire company and the key partners and suppliers. A digital enterprise uses the product creation process for competitive advantage. The product creation process facilitates innovation by encouraging designers and engineers to leverage the digital information available throughout the extended aerospace & defense enterprise, including customers, partners, and suppliers to create new, high quality products demanded by new and existing markets. In the after-delivery market, the digital enterprise leverages the use of current product configuration data, technical publications, and maintenance procedures for OEM’s, airlines, and MRO service providers. Customer airlines can be supported faster, and more accurately with maintenance manuals that reflect the exact engineering configuration and specifications that are linked to back end systems that allow spare parts to be ordered on-line and delivered anywhere in the world. The digital enterprise is truly a stream of data being used and enhanced as it flows from customer requirements to product in operation.

To summarize, a digital manufacturing enterprise in aerospace & defense capitalizes on opportunities in four areas:

Digitizatio: A digital enterprise turns digital information into knowledge by interpreting and utilizing information available throughout the product development process. In evaluating an engineering design for a wing/engine combination, designers can understand manufacturability issues; manufacturing engineers can visualize how the assembly will fit together; engineers can predict product performance through virtual simulation studies; electronic mockups allow engineering, manufacturing, and maintenance professionals to go places and see things that would be very difficult in a physical mockup. In the after-delivery market, current maintenance information can be available through a browser for support of products anywhere in the world.

Capital utilization: A digital enterprise creates best practices and leverages them across the entire enterprise. It captures and re-uses product and people knowledge to ensure continual product excellence, quality improvements, and cost reductions. Design "shortcuts" and "tips", and more efficient manufacturing steps can be shared throughout the corporation. Maintenance procedures can be documented and visualized for use in customer support applications.

Globalization: A digital enterprise leverages the opportunities of globalization for its supply chain or distribution needs. It utilizes a world class supply chain infrastructure including the Internet to distribute the product development process throughout multiple companies, each of which excels at its core competency. Anyone can work anywhere with accurate, up-to-date 3D digital data and process information that flows seamlessly throughout the extended aerospace & defense enterprise to optimize product development. This same infrastructure can be used to support accurate product definition for after-delivery maintenance support anywhere in the world.

Competition: A digital enterprise uses its product creation process as a competitive weapon. The key to generating profit in aerospace & defense firms is product development. It is in the development and design processes, not on the factory floor, where the majority of total cost and potential profitability is established. Using partners and suppliers as part of the extended aerospace & defense digital enterprise is a key to success in the 21 ^st century where the true competition will be between supply chains providing value to their customers.

ENOVIA Technology – Enabling the Digital Manufacturing Enterprise

For 18 years IBM and Dassault Systemes have had a strategic relationship, with IBM marketing, selling and servicing Dassault's leading-edge CAD/CAM/CAE software. More recently, the two companies jointly evolved and refined the concept of a digital enterprise for manufacturing companies. The vision calls for a product to be developed, simulated, manufactured and maintained in digital form, entirely in the computer throughout its life cycle. This vision anticipated that a company's product creation process could become its strategic competitive weapon.

A crucial enabling technology to support this digital manufacturing enterprise vision comes from the ENOVIA Corporation, a Dassault Systemes subsidiary. The ENOVIA Corporation was created in 1998 by Dassault Systemes with the express purpose of delivering enterprise capabilities that form the core of the digital enterprise for manufacturers.

The ENOVIA Solution fuels innovation by providing to all disciplines within the product development process the proper context in which to exploit product information. There are five technology foundations supporting the ENOVIA solution:

ENOVIA Portal: The ENOVIA Portal solutions allow organizations to create an engineering information portal around their internal or extended operations. Providing both Web-based and Windows-based access, the portal solutions allow extended enterprise users quick and easy access to product and process knowledge typically reserved for users of dedicated applications. The ENOVIA Portal solutions provide information manipulation tools, including high to low end 3-D graphic simulation and synthesis applications, Web publishing, markup and delivery tools. Using digital mockup and visualization, users can understand product characteristics and behavior, enhancing decision support and enterprise communications.

Enterprise Life Cycle Applications: ENOVIA Life Cycle Applications implement the methodologies that support a digital enterprise. These are best of breed product development methodologies where digital product definitions, associated processes and resources are seamlessly integrated in a manner that promotes iteration, optimization and simulation throughout their life. These methodologies are supported by dedicated functionality tailored for each significant stage of a product’s evolution. This functionality captures a product’s mission, specification and intent. There is capability to define, track, evolve and communicate the conceptual, functional and detail development of a product and the means and methods to simulate, analyze, test, release, produce and maintain it. There is also functionality to integrate multiple individuals, teams, disciplines, organizations and sites into collaborative or segregated communities.

Enterprise Product, Process and Resource (PPR) Hub: The PPR Hub is the intelligent data model for a digital enterprise. The PPR Hub integrates information used to define products, manufacturing and maintenance processes, manufacturing and maintenance resources, specifications and product support deliverables along with other core data that comprise the product life cycle data model. It integrates the associated applications, data models and data elements that constitute or are produced by ENOVIA Life Cycle Applications. By linking product information and manufacturing processes and resources, the PPR Hub is the key enabler of true collaborative engineering.

Enterprise Architecture: The ENOVIA Enterprise Architecture addresses the flexibility and scalability required to deploy the digital enterprise within and beyond the confines of the enterprise. Communication methods, interfaces and other core components of the ENOVIA Enterprise Architecture are based on standards. As an example, ENOVIA applications are developed on an internal data model written in EXPRESS, the ISO standard information modeling language developed as the core of the STEP standard. Direct implementation and utilization of standards minimize the total cost of ownership as it addresses deployment as well as the maintenance of the solution and the data it produces.

Rapid Application Development Environment (RADE): The ENOVIA Rapid Application Development Environment supports rapid and efficient integration to a large variety of existing enterprise applications and systems that will participate in the product creation environment. It allows customers to extend upon native ENOVIA Life Cycle Applications, further enhancing the flexibility and completeness of the integration facilities. This combined capability also ensures forward compatibility from past to future releases of the ENOVIA Solutions.

IBM Business Transformation Consulting and Services

Software alone, no matter how good, is rarely enough to help a manufacturer become a digital enterprise. Almost always, it takes implementation expertise and experienced consultants well versed in transforming business processes and strategies to help guide company executives. For example, IBM's technical experts and consultants understand ENOVIA Solutions and can implement them in the easiest, most effective manner. These experts view any transformation into a digital enterprise as involving three phases: Internet awareness and Web presence, piloting access to core systems and third and most important, integrating and, if necessary, transforming key processes and applications across the business both internally and externally so they run in a scaleable, available and safe environment.

IBM / Dassault Systemes International Competency Center

To aid the digital enterprise implementation process, IBM Corporation and Dassault Systèmes created the IBM / Dassault Systèmes International Competency Center (IDSICC) located at Dassault Systèmes headquarters in Suresnes, France, with a Geographic Competency Center located in Charlotte, North Carolina, USA. It is the ninth ICC operated by the IBM Solution Developer Marketing organization and is staffed by a team of highly skilled developers from both IBM and Dassault Systèmes. All have extensive hands-on experience with implementing IBM and Dassault Systèmes solutions for customers.

The center’s mission is to provide worldwide technical experience and comprehensive digital enterprise system recommendations to customers as well as to IBM Business Partners and IBM users of these solutions to address every phase of development from research to implementation and production.

A vital task of the competency center will be the integration of key IBM e-business technologies to implement the Digital Manufacturing Enterprise vision. The center will deliver custom sizing recommendations for IBM’s leading RS/6000, IntelliStation and Netfinity workstations and servers as well as integration of strategic e-business middleware and systems management software such as Lotus, DFS, DB2 UDB, MQSeries, WebSphere, ADSM and Tivoli. Skilled engineers from each of these IBM labs are part of the core staff within the center working with customers to provide integration support and total enterprise solution implementation.

The competency center builds on the IBM / Dassault Systèmes partnership and demonstrates IBM’s commitment to deliver leading-edge engineering solutions. The center brings together the vast technical resources of IBM and Dassault Systèmes and provides the knowledge and experience customers need for faster, more cost-effective implementations.

ENOVIA and IBM e-business Solutions in Action

A number of companies throughout the world have already begun their journey to becoming a digital enterprise. We will use the following case study to illustrate how one aerospace & defense firm has transformed their business. Sikorsky Aircraft, has used IBM e-business solutions in combination with ENOVIA technology for their own advantage and the advantage of their business partners and customers.

Aerospace & Defense Case Study: Sikorsky

Just before Christmas 1998, an S-92A Helibus prototype lifted off on its maiden flight at the Sikorsky Flight Development Center in West Palm Beach, Fla. A midsize chopper, the Helibus can carry 19 passengers in an airline-style cabin or 22 to 24 soldiers in a utility layout.

Like a growing number of sophisticated aerospace projects, the Helibus is a truly global product. The cabin, designed and built by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Japan, is attached to a nose cockpit module-including the cockpit floor, walls, roof, controlling linkages, and wiring-designed by Aerospace Industrial Development Corporation in Taiwan. The big fuselage then receives the tailcone from Gamesa in Spain, the vertical fin from Jingdezhen Helicopter Group/CATIC in China, and the landing gear and fuel sponsors from Embraer in Brazil. The Sikorsky Aircraft subsidiary of United Technologies manufactures the Helibus transmission, rotor system, and other high-value components, and then assembles the S-92 in the same factory in Stratford, Conn., that has built Black Hawk and Seahawk helicopters for the military since 1974.

But this is not just an international production program based on build-to-print guidelines, where the subcontractor puts together whatever Sikorsky's drawings indicate. The Helibus project gives its global partners the authority to design the details they build. Design engineers in far-distant locations contribute in virtually real time to a three-dimensional electronic mockup that goes together like the real thing.

"This is a leading-edge concept," says Dave Burdick, a vice president of engineering applications at GartnerGroup. "The supply-chain partners are true design collaborators rather than design fulfillers. They have the authority to originate design intent rather than just process it."

The S-92 partners are linked by an international wide-area network (WAN) to a common, digital 3-D model that speeds development and eliminates costly misunderstandings. Probably more than any previous international aerospace partnership, the S-92 effort required a broad, early commitment to distributed information technology. "If we hadn't had it, we'd have had questions as to whether we could pull off what we did," says S-92 integration team leader Tom Toner.

Sikorsky didn't take this bold step into leading-edge information technologies just because its engineers thought they needed to. Easy assembly without the need to rework promises dramatic savings in manufacturing costs and makes possible cost-effective made-to-order helicopters. That's critical to Sikorsky and its partners because their markets have changed dramatically. Orders for the intermediate- and heavyweight helicopters Sikorsky builds have fallen in the short term, along with defense budgets and oil prices (as oil companies need fewer helicopters to support offshore exploration and production).

At the heart of Sikorsky's business model for the S-92 is the 3-D electronic mockup that reduces the cost of building the helicopter and of developing the option packages. "I think each one of these major option suites would be a major implementation if we didn't have the shared three-dimensional database," says S-92 IT specialist Michael Cohen. "There would be a lot of prototyping, a lot of cut-and-try, a lot of fitting."

Some S-92 preliminary design work was done on two-dimensional computer-aided design (CAD) systems that replicated traditional drafting procedures and stored drawings in electronic form. But the Sikorsky team realized that if they really wanted to reduce the cost and speed the development of the new helicopter, they would have to work in 3-D CAD. Three-dimensional design moved them from drawings to models that supported structural and dynamic analyses, computer-controlled machining, and assembly visualization. "Having the 3-D data was also a way to make sure communication was straightforward," explains Toner. "There's much less ambiguity when you can view the design in 3-D and see how the parts relate to one another."

Sikorsky invested around $2.6 million in 130 workstations. For the sake of diplomacy, international partners were given the responsibility for making their own IT infrastructure improvements. Exchanging data between the designers and the electronic mockup involves taking the 3-D models released to Sikorsky by its international partners and updating the CATIA model on the server network and then the electronic mockup in IGOR, Sikorsky's electronic drawing vault. The partners do not have direct access to IGOR, so an automated transfer routine dumps released drawings from the vault into the network. The server senses what data was released from the electronic mockup and issues a message to the user confirming what data should be in the user's possession. The partners maintain their own databases of the models being worked on, while special interface software keeps all databases concurrent.

Informal communications between Helibus design groups are routinely carried by e-mail and Internet-based FTP (File Transfer Protocol). All communications are in English, the universal language of the world aerospace industry. Because of the widely different time zones, videoconferencing is used only occasionally.

The network, which cost $15,000 to $20,000 to set up and about $30,000 a month to maintain, pays off in the lean Sikorsky presence at each partner site. In-country teams include a leader from purchasing with business responsibility, an airframe lead designer with technical responsibility, a manufacturing engineer to deal with whether the pieces can actually be produced, and a quality-assurance representative. Teams may be augmented for a time to address specific issues, but Tom Toner observes, "If we didn't have the 3-D database, the requirement to have a much larger team in-country would have been an issue. Communications would also have been difficult to manage with only 2-D data."

When electronic models turned into real parts, CAD tools saved the S-92 program an impressive amount of fabrication time and money. For example when the first canopy roof was laid up, only 4% of the plies had to be changed, versus 40% on similar components made in the past. Composite cockpit components were also produced 27% faster than comparable parts on earlier programs.

Hopefully, this Sikorsky example provides a sense of the transforming potential that e-business strategies, processes and techniques coupled with ENOVIA technologies can provide for manufacturing companies of any size. Sikorsky didn't just "do it better" or "do it cheaper." They developed a whole new way to design and build a helicopter that included not only improvements to their own processes, but involved their supplier-business partners as well. Clearly, Sikorsky and its partners all benefited from the faster, more accurate design process. Most importantly, time-to-market improved significantly, positioning Sikorsky well for the anticipated rebound in sales of this type of aircraft.

While the software and networking technologies are important, Sikorsky officials are quick to add that the required transformation of their basic business processes and the implementation of these digital enterprise steps could not have been accomplished without help from IBM acting in a service capacity.

The point to be made here is that good manufacturing companies keep getting better because they believe no process – especially the innovation/design process – should ever be immune from being reviewed and improved. Conducting such reviews under the magnifying glass of e-business principles and strategies can yield ideas not seen before.

Summing Up: Points to Remember

For aerospace & defense firms, the advantages of adopting e-business and becoming a digital enterprise are real and they are now. But because entering the world of e-business truly involves a fundamental transformation of strategic direction and operations, it must be approached with care, as well as speed and decisiveness.

Opportunities to increase competitiveness are bigger than ever. A digital enterprise leverages changes in four key areas: digitization, capital utilization, globalization, and competition. While operational efficiency is now a competitive necessity, a product creation process and overall product lifecycle process that facilitates innovation and maintainability can deliver competitive advantage. The design, build, and support process works faster, cheaper, and more effectively when the supporting infrastructure, tools, and data are designed and integrated to flow smoothly throughout the aerospace & defense extended enterprise, including customers and suppliers.

The bottom line is that e-business can deliver better-run businesses, lower costs with better products and services, satisfied customers and suppliers . . . and more profits and happy shareholders! It's time to act. If aerospace & defense firms wait until their competition does something, that's not good enough. The time to look closely at how things are done and how those things can be transformed into a competitive advantage is now.

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