Aerospace and Defense

The aerospace and defense industries are in a state of change.  Transformation is underway in the development, manufacture, and distribution areas.  Controlling costs, balancing supply and demand, managing complex inventory issues, ensuring on-time delivery, improving quality, accelerating time to market, and transforming operations is at the core of the Steelwedge aerospace and defense industry solution.

Industry Issues

Supply chains in the aerospace and defense industry are evolving at an accelerated pace. Variability is becoming a critical business driver across all of its market segments. In addition, due to the push for increased cost effectiveness, industry players are globalizing their supply chains and working with partners from all over the world. Today’s A&D supply chains are characterized by the need to manufacture increasingly complex equipment and systems, ongoing pressure to reduce costs, extended product life cycles, requirements for optimized asset utilization, turn-key support services, and ongoing requirements from regulatory and safety agencies.

Meeting the many challenges that emerged as a result of these new industry dynamics, aerospace and defense companies have increasingly relied on automation and technology enhancements - designed to work on removing business “silos,” improving collaboration and fueling gains in productivity. In addition, companies have embarked on initiatives focused on reducing costs through improving procurement processes.

Advances of the past 25 years have enabled aerospace and defense companies to overcome some of its challenges, the industry is ready for the next major leap in productivity. This major leap in productivity will come from improvements in cross-functional processes that leverage a common set of services and data standards wherever possible.

World Class Aerospace Companies

What should an aerospace and defense company do to excel in this changing environment? Most importantly, a company should move from value shifting to value creation. It is important to understand where value is being lost and how to close the gaps in planning and execution. Instead of asking what happened, focus on "when did you know and what did you do?" or "why didn’t you inform others?"

It is also important to adopt the seven principles for an agile enterprise, as well as to establish requirements and commitments for dependability for both OEMs and suppliers. Aerospace and defense companies need to focus not only on data exchange standards but also on real process improvements.