The future aerospace factory

Andy Silcox, research director at AMRC/Wales and Chair of the High Value Manufacturing Catapult Aerospace Strategy Team brings some clarity to Future Factory philosophy.

What is the ‘Future Factory’? A Google search of the term yields 152 million results so a ‘one size fits all’ definition is impossible to ascertain. However, The High Value Manufacturing Catapult’s recent consultation with the UK aerospace manufacturing community has uncovered unanimous agreement that the Future Factory must have flexibility and responsiveness at its core.

While it is true that the demand for conventional commercial air travel will more than double over the next 15 years, the revolution in aviation on our doorstep – through the advent of urban air transport and disruptive aircraft and propulsion solutions – will demand a level of flexibility and responsiveness that is simply impossible with current manufacturing capabilities and facilities.

Certainly, at the OEM and tier 1 supplier level there needs to be a dramatic step change away from the status quo of fixed-in-time production lines, dedicated to the same single product for 25 years or more, and from the manual manufacturing processes that still dominate these lines.

Today’s aerospace manufacturing industry is dominated by those organisations who demonstrate the best economies of scale, but the future will be won by those who can execute faster than their competition.

There is a clear understanding that in order for UK manufacturers to remain competitive in the new era of aviation, there must be a continual, rapid evolution of products and processes to take advantage of new manufacturing technologies and materials as soon as they become available. The grand challenge for the aerospace manufacturing industry is how to facilitate that rapid evolution whilst ensuring airworthiness of the aircraft is maintained.

Technologically, the advent of industrial digitalisation is universally regarded as the critical enabler to achieving this new era of hyper flexible, hyper responsive manufacturing capability. A dynamic digital backbone running through all aspects of the value chain coupled with new manufacturing technologies, such as additive manufacturing, advanced visualisation and intelligent automation, is forecast to give rise to step change in industrial productivity and flexibility. It’s therefore vital that the aerospace industry embraces the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

The journey toward digitalisation, however, is not a simple one especially for the SMEs at the lower tiers of the supply chain. With the marketplace flooded with technology vendors pushing their individual Industry 4.0 solutions, it can be an extremely daunting prospect for a SME to navigate their way through the noise to make the correct investment decisions that will enable them to connect with their customers and deliver the Industry 4.0 vision of continuous, productive change through the dynamic use of data.

Industry 4.0 also doesn’t automatically imply a future state of ‘lights out’ automation. There is a widespread belief that future factories will still require significant human, shopfloor input. It is, however, acknowledged that the skills required today will be completely different to the skills required in the future. This presents a significant challenge to the UK aerospace industry as the generational hand down of knowledge will no longer be a valid method for upskilling the workforce. A new training model will be required to educate and continually update the workforce’s knowledge in modern manufacturing technology.

In the face of these challenges it would be easy for UK manufacturers to conclude that the best option is to sit back and wait for Industry 4.0 to be done to them. However, the recent Made Smarter review on industrial digitalisation – chaired by Siemens UK CEO, Juergen Maier – provided a coherent roadmap around which the Aerospace Growth Partnership and Aerospace Technology Institute have built a strategy to develop the future manufacturing capability of UK aerospace; and in the High Value Manufacturing Catapult Centres there is the mechanism to deliver that capability to all levels of the industry, in terms of both technology and skills. The UK is therefore, fantastically equipped to be the driving force in the Fourth Industrial Revolution just as it was in the first.

www.amrc.co.uk