Lockheed Martin Aeronautics selects Siemens Xcelerator as the digital platform for today – and tomorrow

Lockheed Martin is a world leader in defense. They understand the importance of innovation, cost efficiencies and time to market.

These days building an aircraft, or even a subsystem, is a far more challenging endeavor given the drastically changing landscape. Aerospace companies must adopt new processes, new technologies and new ways of thinking in order to stay on top of their game.

Given the demand to dramatically reduce new program costs and deliver new products and capabilities faster, Lockheed Martin decided to move forward with a new set of business objectives. Among the key criteria was the need to achieve a dramatic reduction in cycle time.

A thorough evaluation required

Building new factories or introducing lean processes is not enough to reach these new milestones. Systemic change is required. Enabling new processes and empowering people with new technology that looks at the “enterprise as a whole” is the only way Lockheed Martin would reach its lofty new goal.

Lockheed conducted a significant in-depth evaluation to determine who in the marketplace could deliver the technology and process required to meet its new objectives. A cross-discipline team of employees was asked to participate. They undertook a rigorous process that evaluated available technology against Lockheed’s best practices and processes.

After a thorough evaluation, Lockheed Martin selected Siemens Xcelerator as their digital transformation platform for new and existing programs moving forward. You can read the official press announcement here.

Why Siemens?

Lockheed Martin found that the unified Xcelerator approach best fits their objectives and addressed their business challenges – to deliver new programs faster at a much lower cost.

A few of the advantages available in Xcelerator include:

• Xcelerator is an open and flexible modern ecosystem enabling greater collaboration and innovation earlier in the process throughout all domains. 
  
• Xcelerator streamlines advanced design – bringing formerly isolated domains of mechanical, electrical, electronic, simulation and software upfront keeping the design for manufacturing and sustainment front and center. 
  
• Xcelerator contains software and services that help improve and evolve processes, including product and application lifecycle management, low-code development and cloud-based analytics.
  
• Xcelerator includes a comprehensive digital twin along with seven digital threads enabling cross-domain engineering, virtual validation and continuous product and process improvement.
  
• Xcelerator provides both personalized and adaptable solutions that easily scale as needs, or demand grows.

Everything is accomplished within one, end-to-end ecosystem. Xcelerator allows all domains to work together for a powerful competitive advantage. A major feature of Xcelerator are seven digital threads that allow teams to be more productive, innovate faster, and reach program execution goals. For complete information on our digital threads, please read this A&D digital threads industry white paper.

Cloud services delivery also a major advantage

Siemens Xcelerator is now available as a cloud service, called Xcelerator as a Service, or XaaS. At Lockheed Martin, Siemens had the opportunity to change how the company viewed cloud services delivery.

In one example, we demonstrated how cycle time reduction can be improved by not only delivering a new set of digital capabilities to the engineer, but the speed at which those new capabilities arrive in the hands of those designing, building and maintaining the platform. XaaS plays a critical role in enabling this type of advantage and allows for the scaling of capabilities across the enterprise or within a specified program. 

A significant industry trend

It’s no secret defense companies need to move faster – the landscape is quickly changing. There are new challenges on the horizon. New obstacles. And the demand for increased functionality cannot be ignored. We are finding that the defense industry is “all in” when it comes to a digital transformation and that Siemens Xcelerator is the leading solution for a digitalized enterprise.

Here are a few examples of how the defense industry is embracing digitalization solutions from Siemens:

–United States Air Force
Almost a year ago to this very date, the United States Air Force announced that Teamcenter would be used as the single digital solution to support all product lifecycle management.

Here’s my blog, and the official Siemens/USAF press release.

–Northrop Grumman
Siemens also strengthened its partnership with Northrop Grumman, a leader in digital transformation. In July of 2021, Northrop announced that our Xcelerator portfolio would be used to complement company initiatives and harness digital technologies across numerous product lifecycle environments to accelerate the development of new products.

Here’s my blog, and the official Northrop Grumman press release.

–Aeralis
Siemens has entered into a partnership with Aeralis, a British military jet developer, to help the company become a fully integrated digital enterprise.

Here’s more information on our Aeralis partnership.

-Airbus
Okay, this is the commercial side, but still, Airbus is building state-of-the-art aircraft. Just this month, Siemens announced that Airbus had selected the Siemens Capital E/E systems development software from our Xcelerator portfolio to help accelerate the development of commercial aircraft. Our Capital E/E solution offers both a digital twin and digital thread. 

Here’s the official announcement about Airbus adopting Xcelerator and capital.

Whether defense or commercial, the challenges these companies face today are the same challenges the entire industry must confront. Digital transformation is taking hold, and you can’t transform your business without engaging in your own digital transformation.

Committed to the digital transformation for the defense industry

At Siemens, we are committed to the overwhelming success of our defense customers whether it’s large established leaders or emerging startups. Our goal is to help our customers achieve their strategic objectives for innovating new products faster with a focus on digitalization and sustainability. At Siemens Digital Industries Software, we offer the broadest solutions for aerospace engineering and manufacturing. As a trusted A&D partner, and through the power of Xcelerator, we enable further enhancement of the collaboration, automation and breadth of solutions of technology across all domains from engineering to manufacturing to product sustainment.

We are proud of our recent Lockheed Martin win. We plan to welcome many more organizations into our close-knit family. Digital transformation built around the Xcelerator portfolio is alive and well and helping companies of all sizes to reduce costs, go faster, and deliver the most innovative products of our time.

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