How Military and Civilian Stakeholder are Digitally Transforming

Enterprise PLM Enables Digital Transformation in the A&D Ecosystem

The Aerospace and Defense (A&D) ecosystem is being driven to address the challenges and opportunities associated with data integration so they can Observe, Orient, Decide and Act faster than the enemy. Such urgency underpins the many digital transformation initiatives underway with government entities, contractors, and sub-contractors – both military and civilian. Through digital transformation, they can speed new capability insertion, innovate with product development, improve asset uptime and lower support costs. 
However, such seismic change is complex and the impacts of Covid-19 have further complicated matters as organizations encounter these common problems:

• Seeing only small components of a program and a subset of data instead of the lifecycle of product development, acquisition and readiness.  
• Accessing key data attributes and engineering artifacts that are often locked inside PDFs.  
• Maintaining configuration control over millions of part objects and workflows, each with relationships to documents and models.
• Managing different data elements across hundreds of programs and thousands of personnel.  
• Supporting release processes.  
• Ingesting product data – especially CAD data – from multiple sources in multiple formats.   
• Streamlining readiness analysis by ingesting PLM, ERP and logistics data automatically.
• Rationalizing all this change amid Covid-19 challenges with IT systems that are not set up or designed for remote workers. 

Numerous organizations in the A&D ecosystem are leveraging product lifecycle management (PLM) to enable digital transformation and address these challenges, and are already improving speed to capability/readiness and achieving hard cost savings as a result.

Achieve Fast Time to Value with Windchill

Many of these organizations are succeeding with their digital transformation by taking advantage of Windchill, the industry-leading PLM software from PTC. By using Windchill, government agencies and their commercial partners can:

• Access fast, scalable tools to manage the product lifecycle 
• Retire “sneaker net” (i.e., legacy systems that are not integrated and are costly to maintain)
• Create a 3D model-based digital thread

While all three of these elements are important, the digital thread is critical to providing a seamless flow of data up and down the value chain. Connecting each phase of the product lifecycle from design, testing, supportability analysis, supply chain, production and service supports the evolution from a model-based enterprise. Instead of relying on a document-based approach for communicating and managing a product definition, the A&D ecosystem can directly lever the model (based definition). The digital thread also creates an essential “closed-loop” lifecycle system by combining government, contractor, and connected (Internet of Things) product-related data. With connected, accessible system models and requirements, all downstream stakeholders can make informed decisions and more efficiently deliver on their commitments. 

Here’s the potential impact across the enterprise:

• Create a seamless data value stream for both experts and non-experts, providing traceability from engineering through quality, manufacturing, sales, and service. 
• Increase productivity by enabling product development to unite, distribute, and dynamically visualize multi-CAD models and related information with automation. 
• Reduce time to industrialization by making it possible for factories to concurrently source approved parts and plan without errors.  
• Drive faster repairs by providing field service with access to up-to-date product information, including augmented reality along with real-time IoT visibility of connected products. 

Windchill provides the foundation and continuity of product information across the digital thread, whether delivered on-premises or SaaS.  Government agencies and their commercial partners can take advantage of support for enterprise and multi-enterprise secure collaboration, all in PTC’s DoD cloud. Our web-based tools connect physical assets with their digital twins for global, cohesive, flexible, and secure DISA-authorized IL5 offering PA (Provisional Authority) cloud delivery. Plus, Windchill’s out-of-the-box functionality can be quickly implemented and scaled. With a simple link, DoD programs are up and running.