The Industrial Metaverse and Digital Transformation for Aerospace and Defense
By John O’Connor
Without a doubt, the rapid advancements in the performance and quality of highly engineered products have been aided by digitalization. Aerospace and Defense is no exception to this, as we’ve seen transformational growth based on new approaches to how products are conceived, manufactured, and used in service. Growth through further and further extending the reach of digitalization is changing the nature of A&D products, the systems that develop them, and ultimately the businesses that provide them to the market. The Industrial Metaverse offers a new paradigm for accelerating this growth.
What is meant by industrial metaverse?
A new concept that captures the full potential of extending digitalization throughout the A&D enterprise is the Industrial Metaverse. This idea combines the digital and physical representations of the product development process. The Industrial Metaverse offers a virtual environment that simulates the performance of products and the people, machines, factories, warehouses, and supply chains that build them. Then it acquires data from real world production operations or in-service use to inform the organization. The seamless integration of the real and digital worlds provides an empowering level of clarity and predictive potential that can bring transformative change to an industry. Siemens offers a huge breadth of technology in building the Industrial Metaverse for A&D because its specialized software applications, partner ecosystem, and connected hardware offer unique capabilities that create fully associative digital and physical experiences.
The Siemens Xcelerator platform
To achieve this, we offer Siemens Xcelerator as an open, digital, systems-oriented business platform that creates a connected industrial experience. Because of the broad latitude Siemens Xcelerator provides across the product development landscape, combined with specialization for A&D workflows, it offers the industry’s leading solution for end-to-end digitalization within the Industrial Metaverse.
Engineering is fundamentally a learning process and as such the speed with which learnings occur is directly related to the efficiency of development. This translates into business metrics such as time-to-market, high levels of first-pass quality, protection of intellectual property, and competitive advantage relative to industry peers. Due to complex requirements and technologies, any given design generates thousands and thousands of pieces of information in A&D development. This information must be delivered accurately and completely through multiple revisions of the design to build a product. Often, the tasks necessary to define and communicate this information are tedious and complex. In many cases they are not automated. This can slow the overall development process, substantially increasing program risk and magnifying its associated business impacts. Siemens Xcelerator provides a new way of addressing these challenges, resolving them, and delivering heightened business performance.
Solving complexity in the aerospace industry with Siemens Xcelerator
Historically, these challenges have been addressed by creating higher functioning organizations with specialized niches within the larger development process. A relatively small group of experts managed the specialist tasks, and a larger collaborative organization supported overall design and manufacture. This led to inefficiencies, but they were manageable in the context of an overall program.
That historical approach no longer works today. The integrated technologies necessary to support high performance A&D products have driven complexity to new heights while demand for higher production rates has increased exponentially. This creates excess technical and program risk that is not easily managed with a purely organizational approach. It is here that the Industrial Metaverse enabled by Siemens Xcelerator offers a solution. Because the advantages of end-to-end, fully transparent digitalization are magnified when dealing with the data volume and the specialization of A&D, the Siemens approach is incredibly effective. This is why we are focused on helping A&D customers scale to the Industrial Metaverse using Siemens Xcelerator to achieve industry leading business performance.
In the next installation of this series, we will examine Siemens Xcelerator’s core capabilities that serve to build the Industrial Metaverse. And at the center of these capabilities is a strategic approach to digitalization that strengthens competitive position.
