In the summer of 2022, people sought to make up for vacations lost owing to the pandemic, and the phenomenon of ‘revenge travel’ peaked.
The resurgence in demand for air travel should have meant good news for the industry, but an acute labor shortage — remember, 2.3 million aviation jobs were lost during the pandemic — meant that airports and airlines were scrambling to fill the vacuum and avoid flight cancellations.
The aerospace and defense (A&D) industry is battling similar woes, with 70% of companies in the sector experiencing an increased turnover.
The loss of skilled workers notwithstanding, delays in hiring, training, securing worker clearances, and rising costs translate to challenges in keeping production up to match demand.
Much like the civil aviation workforce that moved on, 75% of the labor pool in A&D left for career advancement, while 31% departed for a better work location or for a remote-working opportunity.
While enticing the reluctant workforce to return with higher pay and perks remains an option, the industries are fast realizing that amid the labor and cost-surge crisis, innovations in production planning and creating efficiencies in throughput processes are now paramount.
Bridging Silos with Automation:
Manufacturing efficiency isn’t always achieved until the production of the 100th unit. To overcome this, intelligent software can be used to run virtual recreations on simulation capability tools.
Everything from the projected manufacturing assembly process, field capability and configuration process, flight operations, and maintenance performance can be simulated in a virtual world via a digital twin, even before the first cutting or bending of sheet metal.
This way, any aircraft or engine part that is virtually simulated is manufactured efficiently right from the first unit produced.
Similarly, with robotic process automation (RPA), a digital thread can be created to bring information from the upstream engineering departments and auto-generate work instructions to provide seamless information routing to the downstream manufacturing departments.
With the SAP Signavio portfolio, organizations have the power to design, simulate, and monitor processes to help ensure that transformation value is part of the company’s DNA.
This intelligent enterprise philosophy helps in minimizing the handover time between processes. As a result, hitherto system silos can be negated to reduce the overall throughput time.
In addition, short-term planning including supply chain, spare parts and tools can be better optimized depending on the availability of resources.
While RPA can improve process efficiency, robotic interventions are already improving manufacturing processes.
Replacing Skilled Labor with Technology Upgrades:
With Industry 4.0, companies across industrial environments are embracing additive manufacturing with end-to-end digital workflows.
In the second quarter of last year, the Automation Development Association reported more than $580 million in robot orders, up 25% from 2021.
In the aerospace industry, robots master drilling and clamping functions with greater accuracy than real humans while saving time.
Similarly, a robotic system that applies sealant to aircraft structures saves 20% of time. Robots are also used for quality assurance during production, inspection of real aircraft, welding, painting and polishing.
Robots have achieved 95% time savings in aircraft washing, but welding automation is expected to fill nearly 400,000 welder positions expected in the United States. By 2024, automation-ready organizations need to simplify their implementation.
SAP Warehouse Robotics solutions make robot integration as easy as plug and play. So whether it’s reloading goods into carts as they arrive, handling carts for placement, or even robotic pick-and-place capabilities, SAP Warehouse Robotics supports a variety of scenarios, providing opportunities for warehouse operators.
Our fast-to-deploy, license-free solution gives warehouse management customers easy and secure access to flexible warehouse robots.
But with time- and cost-savings featuring prominently on the aviation industry’s agenda, how can customer experience stay optimum?
Boosting Customer Satisfaction with Technology Aids:
For an industry where small margins contribute to survival, reliance on customer loyalty is huge. Variables like speed and convenience, therefore, play a major role in building customer loyalty. But with labor shortages wreaking havoc, digital transformation is emerging as a viable solution.
For instance, every manufacturer or supplier has their own portal to document their parts or assets, and this causes A&D companies to deploy a manual workforce to track every part coming from hundreds of manufacturer portals.
SAP Business Network for Asset Intelligence can help overcome this challenge by provisioning for every asset to reside on a single platform.
Now, A&D companies can simply connect their back-end systems to the network, fetch data directly into their systems, gain insight into the transactional data of an asset, and execute maintenance activities.
This way, SAP Business Network for Asset Intelligence — a cloud-based network — can limit the use of the workforce and create efficiencies by facilitating secured information exchange between various roles in asset-intensive industries comprising of equipment manufacturers, operators, maintenance providers, and others.
Also, A&D aftermarket providers process invoices from hundreds of airlines or aircraft operators. Their receival, approval, and logging could be automated to better utilize scare resources.
Similarly, bots can read customer complaints, assess the degree of importance, categorize them, and automatically forward them to designated departments for speedy resolution.
If the pandemic taught us the importance of supply chain resilience, its aftermath and the evolving geopolitical crisis drives home the significance of innovation in manufacturing to combat sudden spikes in demand amid rising costs and a depleting workforce.
There will always be unpredicted situations. That said, the goal is to achieve a planning stability for all companies in the industry. Reducing risks through additional information and better planning will allow companies to establish a more stable environment with fewer uncertainties.
And now, industries can be encouraged by the fact that there is an automation alliance that can transform organizations and entire sectors into smart, sustainable businesses.
Originally published at https://businessdor.com on February 17, 2023.
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