Digitalization - The smart path to supplier development and program success

Technological and environmental leaps are reshaping the industry and are affecting greatly the entire value chain. Suppliers are accountable to drive significant cost reduction and ensure higher levels of quality, and at the same time need to engineer and produce increasingly complex components and systems.

In addition, they must optimize their production means to make them leaner, more agile, and more connected in order to drive operational efficiency and meet demand fluctuations.

Diversification into new markets is also becoming critical to differentiation and adaptation to economic cycles, creating additional pressure on the suppliers’ innovation capacity and on the collaboration models required by the new players in the Advanced Air Mobility and New Space markets.

By digitalizing product development suppliers will have the ability to eliminate poor data management practices and secure sensitive data. Shifting to a digital product model on a product innovation platform significantly improves collaboration across the enterprise. By leveraging one definition of engineering parts and bill of material (BOM), multiple design disciplines can publish data into a consolidated engineering BOM. Using one common change process provides visibility for all stakeholders, standardization of change management, and more. This results in fewer BOM errors, less rework and more time for innovation.

Multi-physics simulation and high-performance computing (HPC) offers the ability to explore and optimize real-world behavior of products. For aerospace suppliers, simulation accelerates the process of evaluating the performance, reliability, and safety of materials and products before committing to physical prototypes.  

Leveraging simulation early in the design phase can accelerate development time, lower the cost of physical testing, and lessen the risks in meeting certification requirements.

Suppliers using the 3DEXPERIENCE® platform on the cloud can provide engineers access to multi-physics simulation and HPC simulation a few days. 

Digital continuity in manufacturing provides a shared digital landscape connecting all stakeholders to improve visibility into, control over and synchronization across manufacturing operations and supply chain processes on a global scale. A critical aspect of every digitalization strategy is the move to using a virtual build in planning. A virtual build allows suppliers to replace high-cost physical mock-ups with the virtual prototyping. Besides delivering a substantial saving in prototyping costs, this eliminates wait times that prolong the product cycle. Engineering changes take place rapidly in a "virtual space" instead of a physical prototype. Very flexible and easily duplicated and modified, virtual models serve multiple use cases. 

Suppliers take process planning to the next level by equipping their manufacturing planners with the right visual process planning tools. Visual process planning supports supplier development objectives to increase productivity, reduce overall costs, improve product quality, and accelerate time-to-market.