Why Aerospace Needs Adaptive Production – Transcript
In this episode of Talking Aerospace Today, Todd Tuthill and Suresh Rama explore how automation fits into the wider ecosystem of manufacturing for aerospace and defense (A&D), as well as define adaptive production and how it could benefit the A&D industry.
Patty Russo: Greetings, and welcome to Talking Aerospace Today from Siemens Digital Industries Software. I’m Patty Russo and I’m responsible for global marketing for our aerospace and defense vertical here at Siemens and your host for Talking Aerospace Today. In our last episode, we began a deep dive discussion into the role that smart manufacturing, automation, and adaptive production will play as the A&D industry seeks to increase production volume. We also talked about how the industry can learn from the automotive industry that has experience with similar manufacturing processes.
Patty Russo: We started out by talking with Todd Tuthill, our Vice President of Aerospace, Defense and Marine, as well as our resident expert Suresh Rama. Suresh is a digital manufacturing evangelist here at Siemens Digital Industries Software. He shared his thoughts on the current status of automation in both automotive and aerospace manufacturing, and he talked about where in those industries these technologies can be found. Today we’ll pick up that conversation, so let’s get right to the next question for Suresh. So I’m thinking about the listener and I’m thinking about the industry, and what we’re talking about, whether it’s automobiles or drones or any other product in either of our industries, it’s not just one factory that produces the entire vehicle or aircraft.
Patty Russo: And if I’m in the audience listening to this, and thinking to myself. “Okay, so I’m, you know, maybe not the large OEM or not a huge manufacturing organization.” And I am thinking so this automation sounds great for the big guys, but how does that play into the other areas of the industry? And if you want to speak to automotive, great. But if we could talk a little bit about, are these smart reconfigurable factories accessible to the, let’s call them the non-large OEM, large enterprise manufacturers that are out there providing those components and parts? What does that look like?
Suresh Rama: It’s an interesting question Patty. I think there is multiple questions in your question. One is how does a supplier, let’s say a supplier or a partner in this entire manufacturing in automotive industry or in their space industry, play and adopt automation? I saw one of that, and the levels of automation that they can adopt and how ready is the technology for their adoption and where is the right place to adopt? How much is good enough? So let me just talk about one of the industry that really wove itself into the automotive industry in the recent past.
Suresh Rama: As we go into what we call software-defined vehicles, which is driven by how the customer wants to personalize the vehicle for himself or herself has driven this what was previously called infotainment system has now become a huge human interface system that is now being developed into how, you can get haptic feedback, voice feedback, voice interactivity and also plethora of information that’s displayed at on demand for a customer about the vehicles. This need has driven a lot of electronics and software into the vehicle. And hence, what used to be not as prevalent in the past with very specific electronic control units, now has become a computer in a car that is managing all of this. So the computer industry has gotten into the automotive.
Suresh Rama: I see the same trend going on, especially in the drone manufacturing arena where a whole lot of electronics is embedded in the product itself. And the electronics industry has been and has adopted a high level of automation for the precision of the parts. The parts are very intricate. The parts have to be precisely located and has to be consistently located, and a high level of quality control is needed in this. And so all of the electronics industry have now become part of the ecosystem in the automotive world, and so also I see that trend slowly moving into the aerospace world and more and more so. And automation adoption in the electronics industry is huge. So if you consider them as part of the partner or supplier ecosystem, the levels of automation have really, really significantly jumped up in that arena.
Suresh Rama: Now you come back into the traditional assembly of the drone itself or what we call the uncrewed aircraft. That modularization, as I was talking about is slowly getting into it, which is what is driven by what I call design for automation. The product when it is designed for automated assembly is easier for the process engineer in the manufacturing arena to think about, “How do I put this together? Oh I can consistently do that because they come on a certain volume size and a certain envelope and certain key points where I can grab it from and then put it together.”
Suresh Rama: These are key elements in order to design an automated system and these things are slowly migrating from what used to be a cookie cutter approach within the automated assembly systems in the automotive industry into the drone manufacturing arena, where the volumes are higher, the cost of production has to be lower with lower levels of margin that we are seeing in the drone manufacturing industry
Todd Tuthill: And Patty, could I take a shot at that, too? Because you ask a good question. I’m sure there are a lot of non OEMs on the phone saying, “Where do I fit?” I like to think about our industry, and I say this all the time, our industry is not fully digitally transformed until the whole supply chain is too. All the way down. And I think there’s, in aerospace specifically, there are a lot of pieces of the supply chain that have not come digitally transformed yet. And you think back about, you know, the levels of digital transformation maturity: configure, connect, automate, generate, optimize. And when I talk about that, I think a lot of companies say, well, “Gee, I haven’t done anything until I’ve got to the fifth step.”
Todd Tuthill: And I suspect that a lot of the companies listening to this podcast think, “Okay, you know, if I don’t have this fully automated factory that I can just push the button, turn the lights out and walk away, and it makes my parts, what have I done?” And I don’t want us to give the impression that that you have to have that tomorrow to employ this technology successfully. There are plenty of companies out there in aerospace that are still working in 2D paper. Maybe the first thing they need to do is take that step to configure and move to digital, and to start to connect their data, then automatically in models to their higher level customer, and then maybe there’s just pieces of automation that they’re going to look at. So I’ll encourage our listeners not to think that it’s a one and done kind of thing. That I’m going to go away, build a whole new factory and turn lights out. Don’t need people anymore.
Todd Tuthill: That’s not what we’re implying, but we’re paying a vision of the future where we can go, but just like our maturity model, there’s several steps along the path to this automation, looks at those same step. And I again, I encourage companies to think about where you are and then think about the next step you need to take. And that’s what I encourage those companies to think about as they listen to all this great stuff that’s Suresh has thrown out there.
Patty Russo: Yeah, so it’s not the Big Bang and digital transformation can be adopted in stages depending on where the biggest pain point is or where there’s budget or where the demands from the customer are. I’m going to shift just a little bit and go back to the themes that I heard, and those two themes are volume and variance, and it leads me to ask a question to build on what we’ve been talking about, which is adaptive manufacturing. What is this? Like that, the whole idea of having these flexible factories, smart factories, smart manufacturing, how can adaptive manufacturing help A&D companies address these demands for, and I’m going to add the variant to the higher volume production? Because the whole point is that drones will potentially serve multiple needs, and the same factory could output drones for those various needs.
Suresh Rama: Great question, Patty. It is basically a production methodology that utilizes real-time data and advanced analytics to refine and adjust the manufacturing process dynamically. It also is geared towards optimizing production based on the changing conditions that can change dynamically within a day, within a period of time, maybe in week, depending on the volume of production or the volume of the programs and the variance included in it. It also integrates very smart technologies and systems in it, and some of the key features are the flexible automation system, which is the highest level we were talking about, the integrated to intelligent levels of manufacturing automation. But today with the new advent of AI machine learning, that integration has really pushed the envelope into the intelligent levels of manufacturing automation.
Suresh Rama: Moreover, since we are really surrounded by a whole lot of data, finding the right data that is relevant and what needed to be acted upon is where AI comes to play a lot. But this data needs what I call a plumbing system, or trying to flow the data from the source to where it needs to be aggregated, compiled, analyzed, and then acted upon. And that’s brings us to what we call Internet of Things or Industrial Internet of Things connectivity, and that connectivity has to be established in order to bring the data together, connect the OT systems or the operational technology systems on the shop floor, which are the data generators, to the IT system, which has the sophisticated technologies to analyze and really recommend and suggest the decision that needs to be made.
Suresh Rama: So going back to adaptive manufacturing again, you asked the question. How flexible and ready the technology is to handle different types of product variants or different types of products even? So, if we can categorize the entire, let’s take the drone manufacturing for instance. The same drone can deliver different missions with different add-on parts. Now has a basic component of the drone that can be automated to a higher level and still keeping the flexibility of the additional components and modular assemblies that go in to change the mission of the same drone, and for different purposes, for different customers, can be customized still with a level of flexibility, either through automated systems or a combination of automated and manual systems. So that is something that I would recommend as a gradual progression into adaptive manufacturing for the aerospace industry.
Patty Russo: Todd, did you want to comment?
Todd Tuthill: Sure, one of the one of the things, one of the real advantages I see in adaptive production is, again, it’s back to cost. If I think about what I’ve seen in my career in aerospace, hard tooling. These big chunks of metal that’s set in and big jigs and big rigs that are set up to, everything from mold a piece of the airframe to install wiring inside, to layout wiring, and they’re all custom built to that one operation inside that one aircraft. And that’s an enormous capital expense as well as an enormous training process for the employees to use it. And then when I change the design of the aircraft, well, I may keep those to hard tooling around if I’m going to make the old aircraft, but if I’m not, I push those out, get rid of those, and spend all the time to build a new one.
Todd Tuthill: And that, this adaptive, flexible thing says I’m going to continue to reuse and reuse and reuse my tooling over and over again. It’s a far cheaper way, and that reconfiguration, as Suresh has talked about, will happen not through, you know, grinding a new piece and building a new piece, but I’m going to reconfigure with software, and that’s where we’re going to go. So it’s this, we talk about software-defined vehicles a lot and what software is doing to the product, software is doing just as much to the manufacturing of that product and adding features and the ability to reconfigure it. So a lot more software, a lot more electronics in a world that for many, many years was just a bunch of mechanical things and people.
Suresh Rama: Todd, you brought up a great point about how software-defined vehicles in the automotive industry is a big thing now. The trend is moving towards software-defined automation. In the past, automation was also thought of as hard controls that is going to be programmed at the individual points of automation in the manufacturing system, but today, we’re bringing in solutions that we can manage that levels of automation for reconfigurability through software control. That means software can be uploaded as needed into the PLCs of the world, and also the robot controllers, in order to reconfigure them.
Suresh Rama: They can be repurposed for a different product coming in in a much more agile fashion, and that level of automation flexibility is entering in a big way in the automotive industry, and I think that can be easily leveraged in the aerospace and drone manufacturing, which also requires that level of flexibility.
Patty Russo: Thank you both for more great discussion. This is a good point to break though, for today. When we come back, we’ll conclude the conversation. Thank you, Todd and Suresh, and as always, thank you to our listeners. We appreciate that you make time to join us. We trust you’ve learned something from today’s informative topic, and I look forward to more to come. I hope you do too. I’m your host, Patty Russo. We’ll see you next time on Talking Aerospace Today.
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