Premium AEROTEC adopts Airbus aviation data platform Skywise

The aerostructures supplier Premium AEROTEC is a major partner in all Airbus programmes and Airbus’ first Tier-1 supplier to integrate data with its customer via a secure cloud environment. By using the collaborative platform Skywise, the company makes a big step towards its smart factory vision. Skywise allows full transparency and big data analytics on a huge amount of data in order to recognize trends that require early actions to ensure a stable manufacturing process.

In 2017, Airbus introduced Skywise for better collaboration with its airline customers. As a high-volume supplier with one of the most diversified product mix in the aerospace industry, Premium AEROTEC intends to benefit from the capabilities of this platform. Skywise is integrating both, Airbus ordering, production and quality data and Premium AEROTEC’s production and quality data to perform big data analytics, recognising trends in historical data and using them to predict future behaviour of ordering, production quality and delivery. With a growing number of active users and increasing amount of processed data, Premium AEROTEC is rapidly extending Skywise to all operational functions.

“By introducing Skywise, we intend to address three topics at the same time: improve the quality of incoming orders, avoid any delivery delays and enhance communication and collaboration with our customer Airbus,” said Dr. Thomas Ehm, Chairman of the Executive Board of Premium AEROTEC. “Using Skywise clearly means: Speak with data. Full transparency will become key to overcome misunderstandings and misinterpretations due to a lack of reliable data on all sides.”

To be ready for a further ramp-up, e.g. in deliveries for Airbus’ single-aisle programme, Premium AEROTEC now introduces with Skywise a highly performant and scalable solution. This substitutes traditional approaches to tackle disruptions in the production process in a reactive manner and at high cost. Even the most-predictive individual IT solutions are by definition limited in terms of capacity and inter-connection. Two tools jointly developed demonstrate the potential of this shared platform approach:

Constituent Assembly (CA) tracking and reallocation enables Airbus and Premium AEROTEC to see which components are in production. This allows early and accurate estimation on meeting or not a specific CA delivery date. It represents a time saving of around 25 percent – time for efficiently management of critical parts and reallocation of components. All changes are visible online to both the supplier and the customer.

Station Enablement makes all the required information available at every level of the production process for all parts, assemblies and necessary subsequent parts availability according to the bill of material. Every station leader within Premium AEROTEC is able to see the live status of production orders. This information allows both a proactive steering of the shop floor and a very fast and highly autonomous decision-making, focused on critical items. This one-click solution replaces manual data collecting from various sources.

Premium AEROTEC is a global player in the aerospace industry and generated revenues of 2 billion euros in 2017. The company’s core business lies in the development and production of metal and carbon fibre composite aircraft structures. The company has sites in Augsburg, Bremen, Hamburg, Nordenham and Varel in Germany, as well as in Braşov in Romania. For further information see: www.premium-aerotec.com.