Collaboration, meet acceleration: How to bring together digital threads for faster, more efficient, end-to-end engineering

Complexity has become a bit of a buzzword. It seems wherever you look, every business is promising to simplify complexity, without really specifying which bit. After all, what in life and business today isn’t complex? However, complexity is the genuine state of play for the aerospace & defense industry. In battling supply chain issues, cost constraints, rapidly evolving technology, lack of cross-industry and inter-departmental cohesion, and constant changes, ‘complex’ may feel like the only way to describe the many challenges your business is facing.

As a Chartered Engineer with a background in defense, it’s these challenges my clients enlist my help with every day. And thankfully, the solutions aren’t too complex. If you’re heading to Farnborough International Airshow (FIA) this year, you can experience live demonstrations of them at Capgemini’s booth or chalet. Plus, my esteemed colleagues and I will be on-hand to show you how bespoke versions of them can be applied to your business.

You’ll find more information on our presence at FIA at the bottom of this blog. But before then, let’s break down the answers to the industry’s biggest questions.

How can technology help my business balance cost constraints, innovation, and quality, with increasing product complexity?

If this challenge resonates, it’s because much of the industry is facing the same thing. Balancing cost constraints with the need for innovation and quality is a perpetual challenge, especially in a highly competitive market. Simultaneously, the products we develop are increasingly complex and we must quickly adapt to them to enable effective and efficient development and management across the full product development lifecycle.

The key to solving this? Firstly, Systems Thinking. A way of working that requires probing challenges, asking questions, and interrogating what systems need to achieve before jumping straight to implementation. Taking this “big picture” view of connected wholes rather than isolated parts enables you to break down traditional siloes and is core to efficient product development.

Moving forward, by combining Systems Thinking with advancements in digital technologies (both tools and techniques), we can start to address our high-level problem, drive-up efficiency improvements, and manage our products as a holistic system. There are two relevant approaches here, which you can see in action at our FIA booth or chalet.

1. Model-Based Approaches. This is essential for advancing traditionally document-centric approaches – which are entrenched with inefficiencies and inaccuracies – and opens the door to more advanced modelling and simulation capabilities. It enables the linkage of models to create a system that understands its boundaries, its contradictions, and can communicate the reasons for its design changes. It is the bridge between requirements and low-level high-fidelity technical models created by domain specialists. Visit us at FIA to: Discover how this approach can help you manage complexity, reduce risk, and increase productivity with a demonstration of C-Pulse – a Medical Transportation Drone, developed from scratch by Capgemini from a Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) model.
2. Digital Twins. This term can mean different things, including a digital twin’s simple iteration: attaching several sensors across a system to get a snapshot. However, at Capgemini we always push to utilize MBSE at the core, then expand on it to link up different technologies within the system. Ultimately, it allows us to use the digital twin across a product’s lifecycle and gain a continuous, overarching view, rather than one moment in time. Visit us at FIA to: Understand how digital twins can help you can make data-driven decisions, enhance customer experiences, drive critical efficiency, reduce carbon footprint and uncover new revenue opportunities, with a demonstration of our RT3D airport operations platform – a full digital twin of a North American airport. Learn more about MBSE and Digital Twins here.

How do I break down siloes in my organization to improve collaboration?

Lack of collaboration is a prevalent issue across the A&D industry; not only between organizations but between in-house engineering domains. Though it’s common to organize teams into capabilities, this approach creates siloes between them – separate data, separate tools, separate simulations and testing – which only drives inherent problems and inefficiencies across their work. Engineering is multi-disciplinary and no one team is more important than the need to produce a seamlessly integrated product to meet our customer needs. 

So how do you go about bringing them together? Digital technologies play a big part in enabling and enhancing collaboration; digital continuity breaks down silos by bringing people together not just in ways of working, but also in the tools and data.

What can often happen in siloed teams is that each works on their own element of product development with success, but when those elements come together in the physical testing stage, they fail. Our goal, conversely, is to ‘fail fast’ – increasing early simulation and verification activities so we can quickly identify and fix the problems, allowing us to focus spend on the development and management of our products rather than fixing problems later in the lifecycle.

Visit us at FIA to: Explore the possibilities of reducing component production time by bringing together specialists from across business functions, through our component design demonstration.

What part does agility play in all of this?

The thread that runs through these challenges is change. There will always be change – whether that’s in technology, capability, user expectations, customer requirements, or anything else on the extensive list of variables. As an industry, we must enable our teams to adopt to and respond to change, instead of spending all their time trying to manage it. Faced with a change in design requirements? Ask yourself how you can accept it, and feed it into the solution, instead of pushing back on it and sticking with what’s always been done.

Our industry requires an approach to engineering that welcomes and embraces change, and agility is crucial to adopting that. Combining agile philosophies, a Systems Thinking approach, and collaborative engineering, backed up with Digital Continuity across the lifecycle, we accelerate our engineering capabilities and drive the resilience needed to adapt to change.

Capgemini’s vision for FIA, collaboration, meet acceleration, wasn’t devised simply because it rolls off the tongue. We truly believe if you can collaborate, you’ll combat your, and the industry’s, toughest challenges, and together we can accelerate towards an intelligent future that is connected and sustainable.

Learn more:

Digital Continuity for the Aerospace Industry

Digital Twins in Aerospace and Defence

Intelligent Supply Chain for the Aerospace and Defence Industry

Lifecycle OptimiZation for Aerospace and Defense