Learning from Automotive to Build More Aircraft – Transcript
In the latest episode of Talking Aerospace Today, Todd Tuthill is joined by Suresh Rama to talk about ways the aerospace and defense industry can learn from automotive to transform and automate its manufacturing processes for higher volume production.
Patty Russo: Greetings and welcome to another episode of Talking Aerospace Today from Siemens Digital Industries Software. I’m Patty Russo and I’m responsible for global aerospace and defense marketing here at Siemens and your host for this podcast. In the last few episodes, we began an interesting conversation about efforts that are being made in the industry to digitally transform manufacturing, the challenges that our industry is facing as it pertains to the push for volume, and some ways that smart manufacturing and automation will play a part. Let’s welcome our resident expert and regular contributor, Todd Tuthill, Vice President of Aerospace, Defense and Marine here at Siemens. Hello, Todd.
Todd Tuthill: Hello, Patty. Great to be back. Can’t wait to talk to you and to Suresh about this really cool topic today.
Patty Russo: Likewise, and speaking of Suresh, he is our next guest. I’d like to introduce Suresh Rama, digital manufacturing evangelist at Siemens Digital Industries Software. Suresh, I’d like to welcome you and invite you to offer a brief introduction of yourself.
Suresh Rama: Thank you, Patty, and thanks for having me, Todd. Thank you very much. I came to Siemens about five years ago with over 30 years of experience in the automotive industry, in both OEM’s as well as in the line building arena, which designs, builds, and implements automation lines at both automotive as well as aerospace domains. Right now I’m leading the strategy for, industry strategy for both aerospace and defense as well as automotive and transportation in the area of smart manufacturing and the right implementation of smart manufacturing. Look forward to having this conversation.
Patty Russo: Thank you, Suresh. That was good to get a little bit of background for our listeners, and I have to think that when you joined five years ago, you’ve seen a lot of change and it’s a really exciting time to be in the industry. So I look forward to this conversation, and I’m going to kick it off by asking Todd, if you could recap some of the key points that we covered in our first conversation on the topic of manufacturing, and maybe kind of give a quick high level teaser on how today’s topic and guest will build on that.
Todd Tuthill: So I’m sure everybody listens, has heard all of our podcasts, but if you haven’t, it’s okay. You can pause and go back and listen. But if you’re driving and that would be dangerous, I’ll summarize, I guess. We talked about drones on crewed aircraft last time and the advancement in technology allowing aircraft to do things that used to be only human pilots could do it, and what that technology change meant to the industry we talked about that at a high level, but the real focus was not on the product itself. The real focus was on what that means to how these products are manufactured. And two of the key things we talked about were differences with these drone aircraft, unmanned, uncrewed aircraft versus crewed aircraft is that there’s higher volume and then there’s a lot more variety, and what that means in terms of manufacturing, in terms of driving on the cost and manufacturing them.
Todd Tuthill: You know, if I go back to Suresh and his introduction, you know, it’s no, no secret now to our listeners probably why Suresh was the key guest for us to invite on. He’s got this key background in years in the automotive industry that he brings to the aerospace industry to think about how to do this higher volume, higher variety kind of automated manufacturing and that’s what we really want to talk about today. We really want to get into the meat of, okay, you listen to the first episode. We get it. We need more automation in aerospace. Well, now we want to get into the details of what is that automation look like and how does that automation work on the factory in terms of building, the ability to build these things and what can the aerospace industry learn from automotive.
Todd Tuthill: So Suresh, I guess we’ll start there. Can you describe some of the advances that have happened in the past 10 or 15 years in automotive that you think we can bring to aerospace? You know, what can aerospace learn from automotive what can you teach us?
Suresh Rama: That’s a great question, Todd. And I would say it’s even a very loaded question. Just looking at the amount of automation that is being implemented in the automotive versus aerospace, I would say approximately about 70 to 80% of the automotive manufacturing processes are automated today and in some pockets of the automotive World, it’s going to be up to 90 to 95 percent. While I look at the amount of manufacturing processes that is automated in the aerospace industry, it’s about 30 to 50 percent, and on the high side it’s more on the part manufacturing side where we have a lot more automated systems for high precision manufacturing even at medium to low volumes. Although there is no standard in measure, getting the levels of manufacturing automation, there has been informally a scale with five gradations, if you will. It can go from zero to four or one to five.
Suresh Rama: Let’s keep to the zero to four with zero talking about manual controls, which is no automation or lack of automation. And then progressing from one through four, what we would call basic automation, then advanced automation, going into integrated automation, and finally intelligent automation. And these levels have been kind of developed over the years, especially when automotive industry took to automation really well. Then these things evolved over the last decade and a half. Let’s look at automotive industry automation level itself. Today on an average I would say that automation levels and the automotive industry is around level three which is integrated automation and soon progressing towards the highest level of intelligent automation. Some of the key characteristics are extensive use of robotics, especially in the body in white welding and joining arena.
Suresh Rama: Now, automation is not just about the involvement of robots or robotic assembly lines. It’s also integration of AI and machine learning applications for predictive maintenance of these equipment, be it automation equipment or any kind of machining equipment in the part manufacturing arena and also for sophisticated supply chain management. And that’s where automation has actually migrated into and really enhanced the just in time, just in sequence delivery of parts to the automated lines in order to make them all work in a very sequential fashion. Last but not the least, is manufacturing systems have become more and more flexible and adaptable in order to produce different models in the same manufacturing line or same manufacturing plant.
Suresh Rama: And this has led to the utilization of the plant resources, be it the automation systems, be it even the workforce or the machines that are deployed in the plant to be used for different models running through it so that a model changeover or even a ramp up of specific volume because of the high demand out in the marketplace is not really seen as a constraint anymore, so that they can actually immediately pivot to a different model or a different variant of the same model. Now coming back to aerospace and looking at how things have been done, and I think you captured that a lot in the previous podcasts about how manual the processes are in aerospace. And this could be to many, many reasons, and this is because of the higher level of complexity of the product, the customization of the product for every individual customers who will require it a little differently and which requires a high level of human dexterity and judgment.
Suresh Rama: So whenever we are looking at some of these specific areas of processes which require this higher level of human dexterity and human judgment in order to do the assembly processes, automation may not be a direct play in that. But there are several processes in the aerospace industry that are very highly repetitive, and you pointed out in your previous episodes also a lot of things about bringing the skin to the structural frame or airframe, and that has been automated quite significantly, and many of the big players have adopted that automation be it composite panels or aluminum panels that going on.
Suresh Rama: So robotic automation is being absorbed in and some of the lessons learned from the automotive industry having deployed over there, and also specific automation, what I call that is very targeted automation or specific automation that’s not highly flexible is also being incorporated where human safety is in consideration or ergonomic consideration is in consideration for repetitive actions or tasks by humans to help alleviate that kind of position where we put humans in. So still with a higher volume production in drone manufacturing that’s coming online so fast, there is still relatively a lower volume considered to many of the automotive industry production volumes. So looking at that, that still is going to be a big play in the adoption of automation in the aerospace industry.
Todd Tuthill: Wow, Suresh, that’s incredible information. Lots to unpack there. I want to go back to something you said earlier in your comments. You talked about the percentage of automation in A&D, it being 30 to 50 percent. And I’ll refer back to something I talked about in the first podcast of being on the factory floor in the late 80s where automation was zero percent. So where is that automation? Is it in the final assembly? Is it in other parts of the aerospace industry? Where is automation now and where does have the potential to really grow?
Suresh Rama: Another great question. Many of the automation implementation is in the part manufacturing, the user CNC machines where digital data is directly transferred into those machines and the machines are programmed for automatic operation. The only manual intervention maybe for manual setup of the workpiece for it to do all of the manufacturing operations are automated, be that in the CNC machining world for high position parts. Or also in the world of 3D printing or additive manufacturing, where again there is an immediate transaction between the digital world of designing the part to sending the part down to the shop floor and programming the machines in order to produce the parts either in a single quantity for prototype production, or in a larger volume where multiple parts are integrated in one printing operation. So these kind of things are highly automated.
Suresh Rama: That’s where the higher levels of automation you see. And also some of the quick adoption of automation in material movement is being taken on by the aerospace industry where several of the materials being moved by automated guided vehicles and even in some places autonomous mobile robots in helping the material movement on an as needed basis from where it is stored in the warehouse or where it is brought into an area where it is kitted into kits and then brought as kits to the line site for easy manual assembly. Still, it enables these assembly processes to be more efficient and highly productive, and that’s basically what drives the need for automation. It’s the gaining of the efficiency and improving productivity.
Suresh Rama: In the past, to your point where it was all manual processes, we used to throw more people at it in order to increase production, and maybe adapt to complexity be it the complexity in the process or the complexity in the new product, or the variation in the product assembly that has come to light. But today more and more people are looking, especially in the drone manufacturing, where there is a higher volume, there’s much more repetition in the way they do things, and last but not the least, the thought process of design for automation is creeping in.
Suresh Rama: And that comes in the area of how modular those designs have become, so that integration and assembly of those modularized components or modularized assemblies become much more consistent despite the drone being deployed for different missions, different specific goals, from surveillance to reconnaissance to pizza delivery, even. Right? So I mean, that variation can be delivered from a base, and then add-on features are modularized and assembled. So that concept has driven the adoption of automated manufacturing even more in the aerospace industry.
Patty Russo: This is a great discussion, and we have so much more to talk about. However, this is a good place to pause and take a breath, so we’ll pick up the conversation here when we come back. Thank you, Todd and Suresh for an insightful conversation and to our listening audience. As always, we appreciate the time you take to spend with us. We hope we’ve opened the door to some new ideas. Please check back when we return to this discussion. I’m Patty Russo and this is Talking Aerospace Today.
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.
