Accelerating digital transformation in the A&D industry

The aerospace and defense (A&D) industry is no stranger to digital transformation. Companies have been making efforts to digitalize their engineering processes for decades with the goals of reducing costs, increasing workforce efficiency, and getting products to market faster. The industry has made significant progress in this regard since beginning its digital transformation journey, but as with any innovative transformation, there is still more that can be done.
This was the topic at hand for a recent episode of Aviation Week’s Check 6 podcast, featuring Todd Tuthill, Vice President of Aerospace, Defense, and Marine Industry for Siemens Digital Industries Software. Using a survey done in collaboration between Siemens and Aviation Week, Todd identifies the key goals and challenges of A&D organizations today, how maturing their digital transformations can help, and where artificial intelligence (AI) fits in the picture.
The direction of the industry
According to the survey, Todd says, the top goals of A&D organizations include the three mentioned earlier: reducing program costs, making workforce more efficient, and accelerating products’ time-to-market. Aerospace products are becoming increasingly complex due to industry demands, which often leads to ballooning budgets and program delays, if not outright cancellations.
Meanwhile, companies struggle to find the right people to run their programs, so they look toward digital technology to make their existing workforce more efficient. This in turn can help reduce costs in designing and building their products while also hastening their processes to get products to market faster.
However, the results of the survey also indicate the A&D industry is not seeing the return-on-investment (ROI) from digital transformation that can help them meet these goals. Approximately 72 percent of respondents reported they were not seeing their desired ROI, despite 55 percent of them stating they thought their digital transformations were mature.
The full potential of digital transformation
According to Todd, the problem is not that digital transformation itself is failing to meet companies’ goals. Instead, he suggests there is still more companies can do to mature their digital transformations and unleash their full potential not everyone may be aware of.
This is a topic discussed at length on the Siemens Digital Industries Software’s Talking Aerospace Today podcast, where Todd outlined a five-stage framework Siemens developed to help companies understand where they are in their digital transformation journeys. The five stages include:
- Configure: Transitioning document-based workflows to model-based systems, centrally storing data and making it accessible across the product lifecycle.
- Connect: Creating bridges between data from different engineering domains, ensuring data is up to date wherever it is accessed.
- Automate: The automation of work tasks to free engineers’ time and make them more efficient, starting with mundane, repetitive tasks before moving onto more complex ones.
- Generate: The automatic generation of multiple iterations of engineering artifacts based on predefined parameters.
- Optimize: The automatic evaluation of artifact iterations based on key performance indicators to find the best possible version.
Although a little more than half of the survey respondents declared their digital transformations were mature, the survey also reveals how the majority of respondents are actually only within the first two stages of digital transformation maturity. Companies can still receive their full desired ROI from digital transformation, but to do so, they should explore different technologies and methodologies to reach the later stages.
The role of AI
One technology in particular that Todd says can help companies achieve this is artificial intelligence. In reality, artificial intelligence has already been around from an algorithmic standpoint for decades, but thanks to innovations in large language models (LLMs) AI’s capabilities have grown exponentially in the last few years alone.
It has great potential to enhance technical work and enable companies to get to the later stages of digital transformation and achieve their goals. To start, after an LLM-driven AI has been trained on the language of engineering, it can take on the kind of tasks described in the automate stage, giving engineers more free time to dedicate toward critical thinking and tasks only humans can do.
As the technology develops, it can also be used to generate or optimize more complex aspects of aerospace components or systems, such as the support materials of a wiring system. Additionally, AI can do these things significantly faster than humans can, allowing products to be completed and out to market faster and potentially recover costs.
Just the beginning
If the survey results are anything to go by, digital transformation in A&D is still in its early days. There is still plenty more companies and organizations can do, especially as AI continues to increase its capabilities. If the A&D industry continues its path toward more mature digital transformation, it will one day reach the means to accomplish its goals and radically transform how aerospace engineering is done.
For more information, listen to the episode of the Check 6 podcast, or check out the survey report and this blog.
Siemens Digital Industries Software helps organizations of all sizes digitally transform using software, hardware and services from the Siemens Xcelerator business platform. Siemens’ software and the comprehensive digital twin enable companies to optimize their design, engineering and manufacturing processes to turn today’s ideas into the sustainable products of the future. From chips to entire systems, from product to process, across all industries. Siemens Digital Industries Software – Accelerating transformation.