“Information doesn’t flow.” 

Tim Mahoney, former CEO Honeywell Aerospace 

The nature of the aerospace and defense industry produces two very specific industry challenges. The first is time to market. The product lifecycle in A&D is between 20-50 years. And the second is data overload.  

Because of the complex nature of the products involved, and the unique emphasis on safety, the industry produces (and depends on) a particularly large quantity of data. That data is what enables companies to accurately track the complex development and manufacturing process, and to fulfil the many regulatory requirements.  

Those two challenges are in fact interconnected, because your speed to market will improve significantly once you begin to view your data as a strategic asset waiting to be utilized. 

The A&D value chain moves through four stages, beginning with market intelligence and ending with decommissioning. But most of your resources get invested in stages 2 and 3, as the product you’re delivering gets physically made, and is then deployed and put to use in the market. 

It’s here that the majority of your data gets generated because these two central stages involve multiple stakeholders. Large manufacturing companies like GE Aerospace or Honeywell Aerospace act as tier 1 suppliers, as they’re the ones who have sufficient capital to invest in the research needed for the necessary innovation.  

They rely on a host of original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to supply them with the parts and products needed. And then on all the operators and service providers that they partner with to put the product to use. 

Your Digital Landscape Is Fractured 

The result is that your digital landscape ends up fractured, whether you’re a manufacturing company like Honeywell or one of the OEMs that they work with. Because all those different stakeholders employ their own systems and processes that your organization has to coordinate with. 

This is further accentuated by the kinds of companies that succeed in A&D, where you end up as part of a large organization made up of numerous other companies that you’ve acquired or merged with.  

This allows you to provide customers with a portfolio of products and services, from cockpits and engines to auxiliary power units and environmental control systems. But it means your company ends up operating as an umbrella organization housing numerous, independent mini companies, all using their own systems and processes.  

Instead of having a single, governing process where systems adapt in a structured way, they adapt in response to events as they happen. With the result that, as Tim Mahoney states in his keynote address at Farnborough 2024, below. 

“Companies have multiple systems of record that don’t speak to each other.” – Tim Mahoney  

 What you need, he concludes, is a transformation program that focuses on two areas. 

Consolidate Your Systems of Record 

First, you need to consolidate the many systems of record you inevitably end up with so that you only employ a handful of core systems, the most essential of which being the CRM, the ERP and the enterprise-wide PPM.  

It is these three systems that accelerate operations from bid to delivery and provide the essential performance data needed to manage the business. So it’s absolutely vital that these three software platforms are able to talk to each other.  

Second, you need to apply the same process to your data warehouses. Instead of having data warehouses containing data that is federated, you need an enterprise-wide data warehouse. Because this will allow you to interrogate and analyse the data holistically across the business and optimize the end-to-end process.  

Transforming Your Data into a Strategic Asset 

Now that your data is reliable, consistent and immediately visible, you can reap the benefits of in-depth data analytics, which is the business application of that information.  

The rationalizing and consolidating of your data will give you accurate visibility into key metrics across production, asset utilization and servicing parameters, and your ability to accurately forecast, which is absolutely key, will improve exponentially.  

The improvements to business outcomes that will result will be both immediate and quantifiable. Your development cycle for products will be shorter and your delivery process will improve, because of the better visibility you have into where your risks are.  

While from a risk management perspective, you will now become a lower risk supplier for services in the after-market, and to the OEMs that your product lifecycle relies on.  

Consolidating your systems of record and data warehousing will enable you to transform your data into a strategic asset. And the efficiencies that result will significantly improve your speed to market. 

Cora: Results You Can Measure  

Cora provides you with an enterprise-wide PPM system that integrates all the data from your ERP, CRM and any existing software systems into a single platform. Giving you immediate and real time visibility into all your core metrics. This translates into quantifiable business outcomes, as Jeff Hopkins explains during a panel discussion at Farnborough 2024, below. 

“In 2023 we improved our working capital position by about $500 million, on a base of $6 billion of business.”  – Jeff Hopkins, Vice President GPMO and IGS PMO, Honeywell 

There were any number of improvements that Honeywell profited from once they began using Cora, but the one that particularly impressed Jeff was around invoicing. Once they connected billing milestones in Cora projects, invoices were sent out when and where they were supposed to be, and for the correct amount.  

Those improvements to their billing process helped contribute to that figure of $500 million quoted above.  

Find out more about how Honeywell benefits from using Cora