Aerospace

The aerospace industry faces several complex challenges in production planning, driven by its highly regulated environment, the need for precision manufacturing, and the complexity of supply chain management. These challenges require meticulous planning, execution, and constant innovation in strategies and tools.

Overview

Problems Faced by the Aerospace Industry

Supply Chains: The aerospace industry involves an extensive network of suppliers and partners, often spread across different countries. Managing this complexity, ensuring timely delivery of parts, and maintaining quality standards are significant challenges.

Highly Regulated Environment: Aerospace products must meet rigorous safety and quality standards. Compliance with these regulations requires thorough documentation and traceability throughout the production process, adding complexity to planning and execution.

Customization and Complexity of Products: Aerospace products are highly complex and often customized, requiring precise manufacturing and assembly processes. This complexity makes production planning and scheduling more challenging, as each product may have unique requirements.

Product Life Cycles and Maintenance:Aerospace products have long life cycles, with ongoing maintenance and updates. Planning for production must account for long-term support, including the availability of parts and resources for maintenance.

Demand Variability and Forecasting: Predicting demand in the aerospace industry can be challenging due to economic factors, geopolitical issues, and technological advancements. This variability affects production planning and inventory management.

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Areas That Need Focus:

  • Supply Chain Visibility and Collaboration: Enhancing visibility across the supply chain and improving collaboration with suppliers and partners
  • Compliance and Quality Management: Implementing systems for better compliance management and quality control throughout the production process.
  • Production Planning: Developing more agile and flexible production planning capabilities to accommodate customizations and changes in demand.
  • Lifecycle Management: Improving strategies for the entire lifecycle of products, from production to maintenance and decommissioning.
  • Innovation and Technology Adoption: Leveraging new technologies, including digital twins, IoT, and AI, for better forecasting, planning, and process optimization.

    How ITeanova Helps Solve These Problems

    SAP, particularly its ERP solutions tailored for the aerospace and defence industry, addresses these challenges in several ways:

    • Integrated Supply Chain Management: ITeanova provides tools for managing complex supply chains, improving visibility, and facilitating better collaboration with suppliers. This includes features for supply chain planning, procurement, and logistics.
    • Compliance and Quality Management: ITeanova's solutions offer capabilities for managing regulatory compliance and quality control processes, ensuring that products meet the necessary standards and regulations.
    • Production Planning and Scheduling: ITeanova enables detailed production planning and scheduling, accommodating the complexity and customization of aerospace products. It helps in optimizing production processes, reducing lead times, and increasing efficiency.
    • Product Lifecycle Management (PLM): SAP PLM supports the management of product lifecycles, from design and manufacturing to maintenance and decommissioning, ensuring availability of parts and resources.
    • Advanced Analytics and Forecasting: SAP's advanced analytics and forecasting tools help aerospace companies better predict demand, plan for production, and manage inventory, incorporating AI and machine learning for enhanced insights.

    By focusing on these areas and utilizing tools like SAP, the aerospace industry can address its unique challenges in production planning, improve efficiency, and ensure compliance and quality in its products.

    Navigating the Future with ITeanova

    In this field we have worked on a considerable number of projects in co-operation with SAP experts.

    These projects comprise:

    • Development of a functionality for creating aircraft manuals based on enhancements of the iPPE product structure
    • Development of an inspection and repair cockpit for helicopter engines, including spare parts determination and procurement (diagnosis of damages and subsequent activities and logistics for repair/maintenance)
    • Aircraft engineering through global collaboration of business partners involved in construction processes
    • Enhancements to enable multi-level availability check for critical helicopter engine parts
    • Management of all repair and maintenance process levels (from sales order to delivery) for aeroplane parts integrating service notifications and orders.
    • Production and capacity planning
    Overview
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