Aerospace businesses looking to commercialize emerging technologies are part of a developing business ‘ecosystem’, and the stronger they can exploit the networks within the ecosystem, the faster the market for their products will grow. 

The development of standards can help an emerging technology ecosystem rally Around the issues to promote the successful commercialization of new products. Therefore, standards can make such a difference to the success of innovative businesses: they create a common framework for innovation and establish the ‘rules of the game’.

How do aerospace standards encourage innovation and growth?

Standards set the framework by defining common vocabularies, establishing the essential characteristics of a product or service, and identifying the best practice within the ecosystems that will ensure successful outcomes. Once these rules are in place, the pace of innovation will be accelerated, and success will be much more likely.

Standards also provide a tried and tested framework for taking new ideas from the drawing board or development bench all the way to commercial production. They define the essential parameters, the safety considerations, testing processes, and how to move to prototype and scale-up.

As technical complexity increases throughout the aerospace supply chain, standards ensure failures are minimized, and time and money are not wasted in unexpected remanufacture.

Key standards for enhancing aerospace innovation

• BS EN AS 9100 Requirements for aviation, space and defence organizations. This is covers activities including, design, development and manufacture. It can also cover repair but only of an organization’s own product

• BS EN AS 9110 Requirements for aviation maintenance organizations. This covers MRO activities of whole aircraft, components, and systems

Innovation case study: Through-life Engineering

Through-life Engineering Services (TES) guarantee the required and predictable performance of a complex engineering system throughout its expected operational life. The discipline considers design, manufacture, maintenance, repair, overhaul, and disposal or re-use as well as cost optimization. TES will be key to aerospace manufacturing productivity and high-value jobs in the circular economy of the future.

The TES concept has been in existence in the defence sector since the late 1990s, and the Cranfield TES Centre was established in 2011. TES promote an end-to-end perspective delivering a vision for sustainable aerospace manufacture and infrastructure. It enables a transformation from open-loop linear, transactional or throw-away business models to circular closed-loop alternatives which better integrate engineering with other business functions.

Future customers will only buy services: product-only providers will not exist in many technically complex fields leading to a polarization of manufacturing between the throw-away and circular economies. We estimate that this approach can provide cost savings of at least 20 per cent across much of the UK manufacturing economy in the medium-to-long term.

The key concept in this future economy is servitization. The precursors of servitization were benchmarked by the ‘power-by-the-hour support’ services seen in aerospace since the 1960s and trademarked by Rolls-Royce in the 1980s. It describes a support service whereby, for a fixed sum per flying hour, a complete engine and accessory replacement service was provided. This allowed the operator to accurately forecast costs and removed the need to hold replacement parts.

A fully serviced economy will drive maintenance costs out of the aerospace supply chain. It also means companies won’t need to buy major assets and will just pay for a service that combines the traditional concepts of products and services. In this economy, manufacturers that only provide products and parts will be marginalized and find themselves competing in a race to the bottom. Customers who understand TES will find real value for money from the in-service support of their assets. Many leading aerospace companies are now employing TES, including Rolls-Royce, the Ministry of Defence (MOD), BAE Systems, Boeing and, in the transport sector, Bombardier Transport.

Formal standards and regulations will be key enablers for innovation in aerospace TES. They will aid knowledge transfer and behavioural alignment across the service supply chain to accelerate capability development. BSI and the TES Centre are working to establish framework standards in this area building on BS ISO 55000, BS EN 60300 series, BS 8887 MADE4 series, and BS EN ISO 9001 towards an integrated set of behavioural, process and technical standards for TES.

Looking ahead, there are practical challenges to overcome around defining a common language for the aerospace industry through the new standards. There’s also a widespread need for changes to organizational culture and behaviour across the aerospace supply chain so companies can adjust to undertake TES efficiently. An example of this is better alignment between previously separate business functions like maintenance and design.

Establishing global connections 

The commercial exploitation of emerging aerospace technologies is seen today as key to the future success of the Aerospace sector. This is a new kind of high-value manufacturing, and it operates very differently from the traditional supply chain-based manufacturing model.

Today’s Aerospace sector is a complex global system, with large numbers of different businesses each operating across a number of industrial sectors. These businesses interact with each other in highly complex and interlinked value chains, trading, not just raw materials and components, but also data and services.

The modern aerospace industry is very global in its approach, requiring for instance a wing subassembly made in the UK to fit a wing subassembly made in Germany, interfacing with other parts from Spain, when the whole structure is put together in France. This only becomes feasible when everyone is working to the same rules and definitions for the specification and verification of components and assemblies. In other words, this only becomes possible when everyone is working to the same standards.

In this world, success depends on the number of successful connections and interactions a business can establish, and the connections, in turn, depend on interoperability (DD CEN/TS 16071:2010) or the ability to work to the same set of rules or within the same framework. Standards are the closest thing to a guarantee of quality that supply chain partners can give and receive.

This makes standards a key tool for Aerospace organizations wanting to survive in the fast-moving, highly complex 21st-century global economy.

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