Technology Partners: Balancing the Scorecard for Aviationinfo.tcs.com/rs/tcs/images/Balancing the...

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Technology Partners:Balancing the Scorecard for Aviation

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Conclusion

As organizations in the aerospace domain find themselves competing in an increasingly global, demand-heavy and fast changing market, technology partners with a global presence, deep technology and domain expertise and strong R&D and innovation focus offer a win-win partnership opportunity. Starting with tactical and operational-level partnerships, manufacturers as well as airlines can realize the benefits of lean resourcing, streamlined processes as well as faster turn-around times, directly progressing the achievement of the strategic objectives of cost optimization, customer value enhancement and successful innovation adoption.

At a time when the avionics industry expects and demands that organizations across the value chain focus on value creation, leveraging the capabilities of a dependable technology partner can serve as the underpinning factor to sustainability and, subsequently, success.

“The connected vehicle is leading the automotive industry to its most significant innovation phase…since the creation of the automobile itself,” says Thilo Koslowski, a leading expert on the evolution of the automotive industry.

“The Aviation/ Avionics industry is in challenging times. The need to improve internal processes is paramount, as increasing customer and regulatory demands increase the complexity and cost of doing business. One area that many aerospace companies have not exploited in full is through the opportunities presented by partnering. However, finding the right partner is crucial, as today's environment requires technology partners with a global presence, deep technology and domain expertise and a strong R&D and innovation focus.”

-Christopher Holmes, IDC Manufacturing Insights Head - International

Technology upgrades or changes have been slower in reaching execution and adoption levels in the aviation industry, largely due to stringent regulatory standards, and complexities in porting technology across disparate airplane configurations. The cost of technology adoption across a fleet and the necessary downtime makes upgrading to new solutions a challenge.

Market imperatives are, however, driving the demand for aircrafts with the latest technology as a means to meet the growing and diffused global demand at lower costs, for better flying experience, and higher customer satisfaction. While aerospace organizations including airlines, aircraft original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), and suppliers, are strategically re-aligning themselves to embrace the overpowering influence of technology in their value chain, they are inhibited by operational challenges. The need for extensive technology expertise and innovation delivered globally at significantly reduced risks, cost and time-to-market, has fueled partnerships between avionics organizations and technology providers. This article explores how technology partners can deliver at the operational level of the organization’s Balanced Scorecard along the four perspectives of financial benefits, customer value, internal business processes, and innovation.

Financial: Optimized Costs with Leaner Supply Chain

With market competition driving aggressive pricing strategies, avionics organizations face tremendous pressure to adopt a leaner, more efficient supply chain to optimize costs. Technology partners with proven expertise in the avionics domain, and sustainable, quality focused delivery capabilities can play a key role in helping organizations achieve this objective.

For manufacturers to remain competitive, they need to enhance and broaden their offering portfolio. However, the cost of cultivating in-house specializations and infrastructure for developing solutions across hardware and software platforms is a serious deterrent to undertaking this initiative. Manufacturers can partner with technology providers that have established resource and infrastructure setups for solution development, and benefit from the partner’s global spread of skilled resources and delivery centers for lean and scalable support. Organizations can also leverage technology partners with requisite process certifications for tactical support with activities like independent verification and validation of systems, certification support, systems integration testing and so on.

Additionally, avionics organizations are plagued by resource and cost-intensive legacy software maintenance. With decades of experience in maintaining, servicing and upgrading legacy software within stringent service level agreements, technology partners offer avionics organizations the opportunity to free critical resources for core business activities that drive the bottom-line.

Customer: Enhanced Value Creation, Improved Strategic Ties

Manufacturers and airlines are recognizing the power of technology in helping them enhance the value add to their end customers as well as internal users by improving the scope and quality of their offerings.

However, the time and effort involved in testing and deploying new technology across a fleet of aircrafts with different configurations is a typical example of why airlines and aircraft OEMs find it cost prohibitive to upgrade. With technology partners supporting the development of easily portable, platform-independent solutions, manufacturers can deliver upgrades faster. A case in point is glass cockpit displays, a concentrated and rich surface innovation that significantly aids situational awareness for pilots. By leveraging their technology partners’ expertise in developing, porting and integrating applications for glass displays across various hardware platforms and real time operating systems(RTOS), OEMs can deploy glass cockpit display solutions faster and more smoothly.

For airlines, passenger satisfaction is of the highest priority, and from this perspective, the In-Flight Entertainment System (IFES), a key customer touch point needs to be relevant, engaging and ensure a superlative experience. The onus of offering a customized IFES with high quality features lies with the airline itself. However, airlines struggle to ensure the robust design, development and testing required of the IFES, since this is not a core business function for them. Working with a technology provider can help airlines customize commercial IFE solutions to best address their need for high customer satisfaction.

Business Processes: Streamlined for Lower Risks, Faster Time-to-Market

Organizations in the aerospace domain deal with low production volumes and complex and prolonged product life cycles. With growing competition and a faster pace of change, they now need to be agile in increasing productivity and streamlining their supply chain. Partnering with technology providers that work with global organizations across the avionics value chain as well as other industries, gives them access to process optimization expertise, as well as a vast repository of best practices, tools and techniques that reduce risks and turn-around time.

A good example of this is the re-use of software components across solutions. Manufacturers in the aerospace domain frequently release different versions of product, that is, different configurations for different airlines. OEMs face high software development and testing costs for each version, despite there being more common features than differences across versions. Technology service providers have tools that organize the software application as a set of features that can be traced to an implementation, along with the corresponding test data. A new version of the software product can then be developed by simply selecting the set of components that the product features require to support. This re-use prevents reinventing the wheel, and promotes faster time-to-market.

Learning: Innovation, Cross Leverage and Early Adoption Capabilities

The aviation industry is gradually recognizing the need to leverage innovation and cutting edge technology to achieve higher customer satisfaction, and therefore drive sustainable business growth. Working with a technology partner that is committed to innovation and has proven credentials in this sphere can help execute this initiative faster, with the requisite best practices to make it successful while reducing the associated investment implication. The partner’s established ‘ecosystem’ of technologies across domains, customers and product

vendor alliances, can be harnessed across the spectrum of technology enablement activities– from solution demonstration to implementation to support.

Examples of technology cross-leverage finding traction in avionics are: Big Data Analytics framework for diagnostics, prognostics and health management for aircraft and engine OEMs, mobility solutions for supporting ‘Paperless cockpit’ by porting a host of paper documents on Electronic Flight Bags (EFB)/ tablets, Geospatial Information Services (GIS) for map integration for simulator OEMs and secured networking infrastructure, secured real-time data distribution framework and application development for Command and Control systems.

In the avionics context, richer and more interactive Human Machine Interfaces (HMIs) are important for glass cockpit displays, as well as passenger entertainment. Technology partners can use their experience in programming HMIs for better UI design, faster response time, seat-to-seat connectivity and external world connectivity (voice/ internet). And the years of experience in delivering these business critical applications ensures the high level of quality assurance necessary to deploy the interfaces in aircrafts.