Aerospace Factories of the Future – Transcript
In the latest episode of Talking Aerospace Today, Todd Tuthill continues exploring the tools and technologies crucial to enhancing aerospace and defense production, such as automation and smart manufacturing.
Patty Russo: Greetings and welcome to another episode of Talking Aerospace today from Siemens Digital Industries Software. I’m Patty Russo. I’m responsible for global marketing and aerospace and defense here at Siemens and your host for this podcast. We are back with our second conversation about the topic of digital transformation of manufacturing in the aerospace and defense industry. In our last discussion, we were joined by Todd Tuthill, Vice President of Aerospace, Defense and Marine for Siemens. In that conversation, we began to talk about the push toward higher volume production in A&D, how that’s demanding change to current manufacturing methods, and some of the key challenges that our customers face in making those changes happen. Today we’ll be continuing that conversation. So let’s get right back to it with a question for Todd.
Patty Russo: So what I heard you say additionally is that the challenges, if you go back to what you first started talking about, or one of the things that you talked about in the introduction was factories used to be an environment where everything was touched by a human, and so the challenge today with the need to reconfigure factories and have that flexibility to do it. That’s one of the challenges that our that our industry is facing in terms of trying to meet that push for higher volume output. And so what I what I hear you saying is that the key is rethinking the approach to our factories.
Patty Russo: So let’s shift for a moment because that’s kind of the catalyst for my next question, which is the synergy across the technology that that we offer here at Siemens from software and automation solutions. Can you talk a little bit about how that could potentially play in just that synergy, whether it’s from our solutions or just across the industry that synergy of software and the physical factory and the automation solutions are critical to our customers that are faced with this drive for volume?
Todd Tuthill: Sure. I’m going to start back with, in a familiar place for listeners on this podcast, what I call the five levels of digital transformation maturity. Configure, connect, automate, generate, optimize. And we talked about that a lot. I think a lot of people when I talk to them about that immediately go to, “Well Todd that’s a maturity kind of framework for design.” And it is, but it’s a maturity framework for any aspect of the development of any complex product. What I would say any of the development in delivery and support of a complex product. And our focus in on the third step automate and we think of automation a lot of times we think of that with respects to automation of software and design and the software side. But like you said, at Siemens, you know, Patty, you and I come from a division of Siemens, called Digital Industries Software, but there’s a higher level of, there’s a larger group of Digital Industries.
Todd Tuthill: In addition to software, we do process automation, we do factory automation, and we do motion control within Digital Industries and that offers a whole lot of solutions on the hardware side, on the automation, on the robotic side, motion control side of making a factory operate. Of allowing customers of complex products, whether they be discrete or process kind of products, of assembling those in much more efficient, much more automated ways, and it really goes to the heart of that third step in digital transformation maturity, automation. And automation is far more than moving data in a computer. Sometimes it’s moving the real hardware inside a factory or assembling things as something as complex as an aircraft.
Patty Russo: So the follow up to that then is the, one of the challenges as I, kind of tying back to what we were saying before that our customers have, is adapting and developing their factories in a way that can be nimble and in talking about the different options that Siemens offers. The synergy between the software and the hardware seems like, you know a key to realizing the digital transformation maturity. Can you talk a little bit about how that plays out in terms of the idea of quote unquote a smart factory or smart manufacturing?
Todd Tuthill: OK, sure. So think about a smart factory. And again I set up the example of back in the late 80s in Saint Louis on purpose because that that that factory wasn’t dumb. So it’s not a smart factory versus a dumb factory. That was a factory that was touch labor. It was manual, and really the contrast between the factory of the 80s that built aircraft that was all touch labor and the factory of today that’s smart is it uses data. It uses analytics, it uses automation to do things far, far more efficiently. Things like something as simple as moving material, having materially in the right place at the right time. Something as simple as that, or something as complex as we’re doing analytics on our assembly line in our production, throughput is 20% slower this week than it was last week.
Todd Tuthill: The ability to do analysis and, first off, the ability just to understand that in the midst of production, this particular cell is underperforming, to be able to look at that, to have something to pull the data out, kind of and we talked about the factory 4.0 and the Internet of Things, to pull data real time off your assembly line to be able to analyze it and then to be able to make real time decisions to understand that problem and correct it quickly. That’s an ability. Another thing that we talk about in a smart factory is the ability to do things in a more automated way to improve quality.
Todd Tuthill: And I know we’re going to talk quite a bit more about that in the next episode, so I won’t go too far down that path, but to use machines and automated things to do some of the routine repetitive tasks that might have even caused repetitive stress injury to a human being, but that a machine can do over and over again at nauseam without causing that repetitive stress injury, and to do it the same way in a very quality method. That’s just a couple examples of what you’ll see in an automated smart factory versus what I’ll call a very manual factory that we would have seen a few decades ago in aerospace.
Patty Russo: What you just said brings something else to mind that I would imagine some of our listeners might be thinking about is that this all sounds great, and even though we may need less people, we still need people. We have a gap in a skilled workforce stating the obvious. Right? What is the potential then for this idea of smart manufacturing and the technologies, what’s the potential to have the impact to enable those better decisions or improved quality? What’s the impact of smart manufacturing technologies on the workforce issue across the industry?
Todd Tuthill: Great question, Patty. And that’s the analogy we used, well, why we chose the analogy of a drone for this setup because there’s a similar thing going on in the operation of aircraft as going on in the factory. There are things that aircraft can do now that automated aircraft can do that we thought only people could do. You know, only a human being could ever travel through our own aircraft carrier. That would have been the thinking, you know, a few decades ago, but now we have machines that can do that. In a similar way in factories, there were all these things that we thought only a human being could do this complex factory operation.
Todd Tuthill: I’ll give you an example. Something that happens over and over again in these large aircraft factories. We have skins of an aircraft, the outer skin, and they have to be attached to the frame. Sometimes it’s aluminum, sometimes it’s composite. They have to be aligned very critically, and then they’re riveted in place, and that manual operation of putting those rivets from the skin to the frame is a very mundane, routine kind of thing that can cause repetitive stress injury. Well, we’re now developing machines that can do that task. Similar tasks of laying up a composite part and do only the layouts of composites that we thought only human beings could do that. Well now we have machines that can do that. And I guess the impact on the labor force is if you’re a person that’s doing manual labor, to continue to work in this field, you might need to change your skills. You might need upskill.
Todd Tuthill: And I look at it in a similar way, if you think back about what a farmer did at the turn of the 20th century. A farmer probably had a plow, and the plow was attached to a horse and the horse plowed through the field. And that’s what a farmer did. And then eventually we had these mechanical horses called tractors that pulled the pulled the disk, then went through the field, and then eventually those tractors were controlled by GPS. And then eventually those tractors could drive themselves. We still needed farmers, but the job those farmers did was different, and we may not have needed quite as many. But the reality is what we as society got from that was a far more efficient way to grow crops for a far less price, and that’s what’s happening in the manufacturing field.
Todd Tuthill: And fortunately for aerospace, it’s not a matter of, “Gee, what are we going to do with all these people?” when the machines come to take over the manufacturing floor because right now there aren’t nearly enough. There’s this enormous need. There’s a backlog right now of 17,000, more than 17,000 commercial aircraft. A 10 year backlog in building those things. We can’t build them nearly fast enough. We can’t find the people, we can’t find the factories, we need to build them faster. And this automation is going to enable us to do that in existing backlogs, to build them faster, bring their market faster, and also specifically with these drones.
Todd Tuthill: When we talk about the, you know, the fact that drones were much less expensive in many cases than a crewed aircraft, there’s less margin, less money to spend on building them. So they have to be built less expensively, have to be built faster. So I guess to back to your question, it’s not that we’re going to eliminate humans, we’re going to change what humans do. We’re going to promote them to higher level tasks that frankly are probably more interesting to do and less dangerous, much like the change we saw in the early 20th century with farmers from the farmer that followed the horse. In the field to the farmer that now directs his machinery, driven by GPS satellites that drive themselves through the field. Similar kind of transition that we’re seeing in aerospace.
Patty Russo: So let’s take that one step further. Let’s paint a picture for our listeners. Take out your crystal ball and look into the future. So 10 years from now, how will factories that manufacture for the A&D industry, how will they look different? What would surprise an A&D production manager today, if they could see that future?
Todd Tuthill: So I think the first thing that you’re going to see in in the future is no hard tooling. When I think about capital investment in a factory, a lot of these parts are custom for aircraft, a lot of them require custom hard tools that are just for that particular version of the aircraft. That’s going to go away. We’re going to have very reconfigurable tooling that that can be used in a multiple set of ways, on multiple different kinds of aircraft or parts for aircraft which is going to make changes in the line much faster. The next thing we’re going to see is we already see a lot of use of data today. That’s going to continue.
Todd Tuthill: We’re going to see data everywhere, and everything’s being measured to make it far more efficient and far more reconfigurable to really optimize. And we get back to that, that five steps. We talk about automation. That’s certainly a measure of maturity, but you’re really going to see optimization step up in a big way in in these factories of the future where data is everywhere. And I think you’re also going to see far more autonomous movement of parts of material throughout the factory. So no hard tooling, data everywhere leading to optimization, and autonomous movement of parts of material, and certainly those three things would probably jump out at anybody that saw that could peer into the future and see those factories.
Patty Russo: I’m sure that the other thing that’s on our listeners’ minds is the idea that all of this technology is going to require data, and that data needs to be connected. So that’s, not just connected but and like you said, continuously optimized. So that’ll be an interesting topic to explore as we go forward with this discussion around manufacturing, but for now I wanted to ask if there was anything that we didn’t cover in this first section on the future of manufacturing that we didn’t cover? Is there anything else that you want to make sure that we share before we wrap up the conversation today?
Todd Tuthill: Sure. I’ll say this is kind of something we didn’t talk about but something we’re going to jump into in the next segment. If you think about the aerospace industry, we talked just about aerospace. There are many other, there are other industries that have gone through this transition before us. And one of the key industries that I think we could look at that we can learn from in aerospace is automotive.
Todd Tuthill: Again, back to volume, you’ve seen how much, much higher volume is in automotive than aerospace, and that’s really led to all kinds of innovation in other industries, like automotive, we can learn from and I think there’s a real opportunity there and I’ll stop at that because that’s kind of the topic of our next podcast, and hopefully we’ll entice listeners to want to tune in as we bring on another guest and do that in the future.
Patty Russo: Outstanding. So I enjoyed this conversation thoroughly. I’m confident that we gave our listeners some good things to think about and valuable insights quite a bit to ponder on the subject of digital transformation in A&D manufacturing. So for our listeners, thank you. We appreciate that you joined us again. Be sure to look for an upcoming episode where we’ll introduce more guests who are subject matter experts and cover much more on this important topic for our industry around manufacturing. I’m Patty Russo and we look forward to having you back next time on Talking Aerospace Today.
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