**Alain Tropis** SVP, DDMS, Airbus **Dr. Srinivasan Dwarakanath** VP, Engineering Procurement, Airbus
If there is one industry that provides a range of use cases for Industry 4.0 experimentation and implementation, it is the aerospace industry. From leveraging simulation technology for design and AR/VR technology for training & maintenance to using sensor and automation technologies for product and service enhancement and employing data analytics for faster decision making, industry 4.0 finds a scalable scope in the aerospace industry. With modernization drives across commercial and defense segments, evolving customer requirements calling for customization, and Design for Value assuming center-stage, Industry 4.0 has become more relevant than ever to this industry. So, when we got the in-charge of digital design manufacturing services and the engineering services procurement head of Airbus together to talk about Industry 4.0, it was obvious that we would get incomparable and great insights on Industry 4.0. But, through this interview we probed Alain and Dwarka on topics that are peripheral but equally important to the Aerospace industry and provide cross-pollinating ideas for other industries as well. Here is a deep dive into the views and perspectives on all things Industry 4.0 and beyond.
Alain Tropis
Dr. Srinivasan Dwarakanath
Alain, Dwarka, can you brief us about your respective roles and responsibilities at Airbus?
Alain: I am Senior Vice President and in charge of the digital design manufacturing and services program at Airbus. I have been working in the aerospace industry for nearly 40 years and have been engaged in almost all the different programs run by Airbus, mainly regarding new technologies, new ways of working, and transformation.
Dr. Srinivasan Dwarakanath: I am a Vice President in the procurement function, and I am responsible for engineering services procurement across Airbus commercial, Airbus Helicopters, and Airbus Defense. I have been with Airbus for the last 23 years. I started my role in Airbus in engineering and then moved to Information Management. Later, I became the president of Airbus in India and executed that role for five years. I took up my current role in procurement a couple of years ago in Toulouse. Before joining Airbus, I was in information system consulting and also worked in the automotive industry.
Could you identify top three trends in the aerospace industry and share your perspectives on them?
Dr. Srinivasan Dwarakanath: Reducing carbon emission and making an environmentally friendly aircraft that can use alternative fuels is one of the top trends. The second one is getting newer lighter and stronger materials for the aerospace industry. Materials that would do well at high temperatures with good fatigue and damage tolerance capabilities for propulsion, for example. The third trend is about establishing the last mile connectivity for both passengers and the cargo.
Alain: According to me, two things that are needed for the future are co-development and services. Our industry is set in order to design efficient aircrafts for a very high level of performance, however, our industry is becoming an industry with what we qualify as “high” production rates. The only way to achieve it is to ensure that industrialization/industrial systems activities go together with the design of the product, this is ‘co-development’ of the product and the industrial system.
Services are all about improving products and customer experience and it drives us to think deeply about customer centricity. It pushes us to anticipate what value we could create for customers in the next 10 -15 years through innovative concepts.
From your experience, what do you think are the top three to four areas that are critical today in the aerospace industry?
Dr. Srinivasan Dwarakanath: The foremost critical area for us in commercial aviation in the post COVID era is deliveries of the aircrafts. Secondly, we need to address the issue of cost reduction for recurring activities thereby adding value for our customers. The third focus area is ‘talent retention’. Given the current pandemic, many companies are deploying adaptation plans and people are leaving companies. So, in this time, our focus is on retaining the right talent so that they are present when we really want to transform the company. The fourth and very important area of focus is achieving automation and digitalization by leveraging technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, IoT, AR VR, etc. The idea is to be prepared for the future.
Alain: I think the challenge in front of us is that of efficient reconfiguration. Today, our customers are in a difficult situation, so, we must re-allocate or reconfigure some aircrafts, and we need to do so with agility and efficiency. Although we are in the business of making one of the most complex products, they are heavily customized for specific needs of the customers. Making reconfigurations can be quite complex so, our ability to deal in an efficient way with these reconfiguration complexities is really something that we need to continue to develop.
The second area of focus is “Design for value”. Earlier the focus was on ‘Design to Cost’. However, today 'Design for cost’ is a given and inherent principle ’Design for Value’ is gaining more importance and becoming a very strong point of differentiation. These values range across the spectrum such as sustainability, customer centricity, societal benefits, environment, etc.
The last area of focus is talent and people management. The only way to be successful in the challenges we are facing is to combine the knowledge of the experienced people with the digitally native young generation.
What are the top initiatives under Industry 4.0 program that are undertaken in the aerospace industry?
Dr. Srinivasan Dwarakanath: I will mention a couple of industry 4.0 initiatives which are happening across the aerospace industry. The first initiative is undoubtedly in the area of advanced analytics and for Airbus, we are looking at analytics in several ways and one of the examples is putting sensors in the aircraft to gather information, so that it can be used for various purposes in service enhancement, design improvement and also to address production challenges as well. We have created a platform called Skywise that uses analytics and advanced analytics for decision making. This would be one of our top programs moving forward. The other major initiative is in the area of digitalization of product development, whether it is at engineering level, or in the industrial system, or on the services side. This is also a trend that is common across all other industries. The focus is really on leveraging Industry 4.0 to bridge the physical and the digital world.
Alain: If I had to summarize what we are trying to do with Industry 4.0 in two words it would be efficiency and anticipation. Efficiency today can be captured, thanks to data analytics. As we understand the value of data, we can use it to draw value from information and leverage it to our benefit.
Today, we are using Digital twins to understand how our industrial system is operating and Digital Twin is not just to get a 3D view of the plants, or just simulating a flow, but we are using it to understand how robots are working, how they are interacting with humans, so we are using Digital Twins to determine the best working scenarios and to anticipate. And, this is helping us to be much more efficient because we can simulate things which are not yet occurring, thereby predicting scenarios of the future (when will we increase/modify rates, implementation of new aircraft standards, etc.) and prepare for those today.
What are the top three challenges in implementing the initiatives that you just described? And how are you addressing those?
Dr. Srinivasan Dwarakanath: Industry 4.0 programs are enterprise wide initiatives. And, when we implement these programs, we need to look beyond the immediate enterprise and take into consideration the extended enterprise. Because we buy from our suppliers 80% of what we sell at Airbus, we need to involve them in the overall journey as well. So, one of the top challenges with any of these transformation programs I see, is a mindset change. If we win that game, we are already 50% there.
The second challenge is the one that I mentioned earlier - talent management. It is a combination of two things - having the people from within the company who really understand our way of working and bringing in some of the technology experts from outside who can help the company make the transformation. So right skills, and up skilling is equally important in terms of talent management.
The third challenge is balancing today's priorities Vs. preparing the future. Getting the management to invest in transformational programs that will yield results in the future over the cost constraints and budget overheads of the current day is a classical challenge that most OEMs face.
Alain: I will say, onboarding of the ecosystem is one key challenge needs to be mitigated to ensure that we are generating value/efficiency for the full ecosystem. To enable this, all the involved partners that are working together with us must ensure that the journey of up skilling is done at the same time. We also work a lot on simulation via Model Based System Engineering. For this we are developing a common language – ontology - similar ways of interacting and dealing with models when you exchange them both internally and with your partners, it is going to change the way we operate in next five-ten years from now creating a Model Set Based approach and maximizing simulation and exploration of new design spaces.
The other thing which is very important is that if we are to characterize the way we will operate in the future, it will be based on sharing and openness. What will create the value is a flow, flow of data and flow of knowledge. And the ability to quickly close the loops, simulate, learn, create more values, and repeating this cycle will drive a breakthrough in term of overall performance. We are currently operating with quite static knowledge and static expertise and we need to move towards a flow of knowledge and expertise. It is important to always remain in a state of dynamic learning. It is by the combining of all these that we will bring value to customers and make a breakthrough in the way we are co-developing product/industrial systems & services.
Can you tell us on how you're implementing these Industry 4.0 initiatives? Also, how do you measure ROI? And how do you measure success with some of these initiatives?
Alain: We, at Airbus, do not wait for the next generation of product to embed our innovations, but we are putting an incremental approach in place, where we identify new capabilities bringing a step change in terms of performance, value for our company, and for the overall system. The way we measure these performance steps is quite traditional. We develop a capability, we do a proof of concept to demonstrate that we are not just going to embed something in the system because it is digital, but because we are delivering value. And when we have demonstrated that we are delivering value, we move to full implementation, and the buy-in of the operational teams creates a virtuous circle leading them to ask us to move quicker to bring more values. This way, we are delivering value and we have quick feedback loops allowing us to assess our ideas for their intended value, ensuring a quicker and wider deployment of the solutions.
Dr. Srinivasan Dwarakanath: When it comes to big transformational programs, normally we aim to do these programs for preparing for the future, for the next programs or the next steps. And when we start looking at these programs from that perspective, people can map these benefits to the existing programs too. And this really helps people to come up with innovative ways of doing things and encourages them to think differently. For defining a new engagement model, we employ innovations like engaging the suppliers in a risk sharing approach. We have our own way of measuring the return on investment, for example, as Alain said, there is a value which we expect to be created through every project. And we don't measure the people on key performance indicators. We measure suppliers based on key value indicators. The way we get the value and the way we move forward is one of our return on investment mechanisms.
Is Safety one of those values that you work towards?
Alain: We consider the safety guidelines as the fundamentals, for us, without safety without quality, there is nothing in our industry, and everything that we are doing is with a clear focus on safety. We tend to do not only what is required today but also anticipate what we could do more for tomorrow to always improve the safety aspect. So, safety and quality are fundamental to everything we do and that is perhaps the reason, we have not identified safety as a specific value in the previous elements of our exchange, because for us, it is a non-negotiable subject.
Could you share any specific success stories or case studies on how the industry 4.0 initiatives have helped to transform your business?
Alain: Well, there are many cases, but just to give an example of where we have been able to simulate a full cycle, from when you start to manufacture the first elementary parts of your aircraft till you assemble all these elementary parts, then you integrate these parts in an aircraft, then you will simulate the aerodynamic pressures, the loads; the deflection of the parts in flights, …. and so on. In the past, these loops of the simulation, would last six to nine months. And now, we have been able to do this in less than three months with much more accurate models. We applied it to some of our programs and have been able to run a complete loop of all the systems and propose improvements in a very short timeframe. So, we have divided the time by a factor of more than three, by delivering more value than what we were able to deliver in the past.
Furthermore, we have been able to simulate different industrial scenarios, to give more robustness to the selected solution, integrating unplanned events in the analysis. We have been working a lot also on the simulation to improve the ergonomic aspects, the accessibility, the way people operate, their posture in order to optimize the overall efficiency. We are making sure that all the aspects concerning ergonomics, health and safety are properly addressed.
We have also been working a lot on data analytics, based on capturing the past data (experience gained through our past and running programs) and through machine learning, being able to determine or predict the trend, or to anticipate the overall performance of the system. We have started to take benefit of all these elements to demonstrate value and the results it has delivered are significant.
Could you share with us how you visualize the aerospace industry in the next five years?
Dr. Srinivasan Dwarakanath: I think the next five years is going to be a bit of a catch up, in the aerospace industry, because it's been hit tremendously, and we would use this period to have a long-term transformation focusing on sustainability, because sustainability is a key aspect for us in the aerospace industry. And digitalization and automation will play a key role for us. The interconnectivity between the physical and the digital world and back to the physical world will really drive the transformation and several technologies will be used to achieve this. So, this is something which will come in the next few years really transforming the aerospace industry. Lastly, the entire aerospace industry wants to achieve zero carbon emission. So, we are pushing towards having environmentally friendly products that will lead to zero carbon emissions in the future and development of these products will start in the next five years in a big way.
Can you share with us your thoughts on what has fundamentally shifted in terms of strategy and project implementation priorities in the aerospace industry since the impact of COVID-19?
Alain: I think there are many things that have changed due to the pandemic. The first one, and it takes me back to the comment I was making earlier, is about the agility and the ability to make reconfigurations. We are in an industry which since 30 or 40 years has been in a rate increase, where every year we were producing a few more aircrafts. Or if we were reducing the production, it was because we were moving to a next generation of aircraft. I would say it was a progressive acceleration or reduction. With the pandemic, we have had to face a major rate adaptations, meaning we had to reduce our production rate by 30 to 40 percent.
We have also learned a lot about the ability of the people to quickly reconfigure themselves. I was very impressed with my team. When the pandemic started, we decided to put nearly 90% of the team on remote working. It took us just two days to be back to the performance that we had just before the crisis, only two days. We were able to do it because of the trust in the knowledge and ability of our team to adapt and use all the digital means at their disposal.
Do you see remote working becoming somewhat of a norm or some sort of hybrid workaround?
Alain: We need social interaction, we need some informal exchange, and from time to time, we need to have the people together to interact. Remote working is an operating model that we are using for years because our teams are distributed all over the world. However we have demonstrated that home working was also for some activities efficient and people were able to optimize their efficiency between their personal and professional life. So, you see a lot of benefits, which were not perhaps totally anticipated before. So, what we are now promoting as a working model is the hybrid model (combination of home working/office working). We are starting to look at how we can maximize and take the most efficient approach for the well-being of the people and for the overall performance of the teams and the company.
Dwaraka, given that a lot of suppliers are often co-located, how do you manage that element with the with the remote workforce?
Dr. Srinivasan Dwarakanath: In the aerospace industry, working with suppliers from around the globe was not the challenge for us. But COVID forced us to use virtual meetings, the use of digital technology to interact with the people. While developing a new engagement model, normally, what we would have done is to bring that seven or eight suppliers with whom we want this engagement model, to co locate or to come to a plateau so that they are physically around to have the discussions. But during this pandemic, we followed the hybrid model, as Alan said, we had one representative of each of the company join us in a physical plateau and had others joining virtually and that worked out very well because we were able to get the expertise of these companies, without having the people around physically. So, a combination of that is what we would take forward in the future.
Can you share with us some practices for success for an Industry 4.0 program and any advice in managing talent?
Dr. Srinivasan Dwarakanath: The important ingredient for success in Industry 4.0 is the mindset change. Also, what is very important when we talk about people, is right skills and upskilling. By right skills, we mean the people who really understand what we want to do, and we need people with the right skills to define the blueprint of the transformation. And then comes the technology which can really help us to change it. Because otherwise what we will be doing with digitalization, is what I would call as automating chaos. And the third point, which is very important in the aerospace industry, when we do the blueprint itself is that we bring the extended enterprise into the picture. So I would say, the three important points are get the mindset, get the right people with the right skills, who can actually do the blueprint for you and really be clear what you want to do, it needs to be process-based in order to get the advantage and get the value you want from the overall process.
When it comes to managing the talent and the people, for implementing Industry 4.0 digitalization, firstly, we need to identify the right, experienced talent within the organization so that they upskill in order to be prepared to do the transformation. And secondly, getting the right people from outside the organization who have the technology knowledge and bringing them together is an important point. Merging cultures is an important aspect as well. We need to address it so that the people from within the organization and who are coming from outside are at the right level of mindset in order to make that transformation a reality. And lastly, getting the right skill people from the extended enterprise, from the suppliers and the partners or help them to upskill their people is really important.
Can you mention any best practices around making decisions in choosing the right partners within the ecosystem?
Dr. Srinivasan Dwarakanath: From a supplier partner perspective, I place them in three categories who are going to support you in defining the transformation and help you to succeed.
The first set of suppliers that you need to bring into this transformation journey are big companies who work with you right from the beginning, end-to-end, in order to achieve the goals you have set out in your transformation.
The second set comprises small and medium suppliers who have niche capabilities as well. And it's important to really bring them onboard at the right time so that you can leverage their expertise to really augment what you want to achieve in your transformation journey. And the third but equally important set of suppliers are your technology partners that need to be identified and selected in order to enable the transformation.
Lastly, if you look at the overall supply chain, it's extremely difficult for to get that message of the across the entire supply chain. One of the key aspects for success is communication right from the beginning, as the information takes a lot of time to really flow through. And the communication needs to be through and through, even before you start the journey, through the journey, and even after you've completed your transformation.
