Manufacturing industries across the board are experiencing increasing pressures around quality, compliance, customer demands, and other factors that are forcing operations to adapt for success. Aerospace & Defense, however, is on another level entirely.
The complexity of products, near-zero quality tolerance, and tug of war between uniformly slashed operational budgets from defense cuts pitted against ever-increasing customer demands creates an environment where timely access to all relevant product, supplier, and operations information is critical for success. For most A&D companies, the operational status quo is no longer cutting it.
That status quo often involves disparate systems and data sources for Manufacturing Operations Management (MOM), Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications, requiring manual analysis and contextualization. Resource intensive and time consuming, this gives rise to some of A&D companies' largest overall challenges, including an agility-hampering lack of timely visibility into operational and performance metrics.
Fortunately, today's solution providers, bolstered by advancing technologies like Cloud, Mobile, Big Data, and Internet of Things capabilities, are enabling A&D companies to weave a "Digital Thread"--a bi-directional flow of information connecting departments across the enterprise--to increase collaboration, operational agility, enable end-to-end product traceability and improved supplier quality management, and gain visibility into real-time performance metrics. The infographic below is based on more than 300 survey respondents to date, and summarizes how today's next-generation MOM software applications are helping A&D companies achieve these heightened operational capabilities to forge new paths for success.
For a deeper dive into the objectives and challenges facing A&D manufacturers today, as well as benchmark data and best practices for achieving greatly enhanced operational capabilities through Digital Thread strategies, be sure to tune into the free webcast and panel discussion "Weaving the Digital Thread: Strategies for Connecting to the Customer Perspective," on Thursday, December 11, 1:00 pm EST.
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