Bringing order to a complex and diverse supply chain

Background:

Airbus is owned by the Airbus Group. It is a global enterprise with an active workforce of approximately 55,000 around the world, fully-owned subsidiaries in the United States, China, Japan, India and the Middle East, and spare parts centers in Hamburg, Frankfurt, Washington, Dubai, Beijing and Singapore, engineering and training centers in Toulouse, Miami, Wichita, Hamburg, Bangalore and Beijing and more than 150 field service offices around the world.

The company’s industrial network has been expanded to include A320 Family final assembly facilities in China and the U.S., along with a regional design office in North America, a joint venture engineering center in Russia and further engineering centers in China and India.

Airbus also relies on industrial co-operation and partnerships with major companies all over the world and a network of 7,700 suppliers.

Challenges:

• Complex and critical security certification process
• Production sites on various locations with inefficient flow of information exchange
• Lack of cost visibility
• Need for a better system flexibility for managing unique processes

Improvement:

• Improved flexibility by Aras’ open architecture, which allows easy harmonisation of various projects and solutions as well as seamless integration with other enterprise systems
• Visibility about future costs achieved by no extra charges for future upgrades or customisations
• Respond effectively to changes

Problem Area:

Airbus has one of the most complex and diverse supply chains in the world comprising approximately 7,700 suppliers. In order to keep track of the enormous amounts of product information, Airbus already has a well-functioning PLM system as the backbone of their value chain. However, there is a need for a complementary platform to harmonize various projects, which are difficult to integrate in the core platform like managing test data for all mechanical components on board of the aircrafts.