Aerospace and defense leaders must work faster than ever to meet the increasing demands of their missions, constituents and markets. Evolving strategic priorities, shorter delivery timeframes, and geopolitical volatility amplify this challenge.
From replacing fighter jets to developing fleets of uncrewed vehicles, militaries and defense departments worldwide are making their demands known: innovation with speed. Defense contractors must bring next-generation systems to the field faster than ever, ensuring that warfighters can achieve deterrence through overmatch. Meeting this demand is no small task. In an industry marked by intense regulatory hurdles, intricate supply chains, entrenched vendors, and increasing cost pressures, A&D leaders across sea, air, land, and space systems must navigate significant challenges to accelerate delivery of mission-critical products.
As the leader in preparing A&D organizations for the convergence of digital and physical worlds, PTC enables actionable intelligence to optimally design, manufacture, and sustain the world’s most complex aerospace and weapon systems.
Modern Challenges Require Modern Solutions
Accelerating innovation with digital transformation is easier said than done. These changes require overcoming deeply set cultural challenges that hinder progress and competitiveness. Many defense contractors are saddled with outdated IT systems and processes that weren’t built for today’s rapid development cycles, making it difficult to integrate new technologies efficiently. Larger, more established firms often face rigid structures that can put them at a strategic disadvantage compared to smaller, more agile startups.
At the same time, the growing complexity of new systems—in which the importance of software has reached parity with hardware (and oftentimes exceeds it)—demands a new level of collaboration and efficiency. To operate at the speed of relevance, defense contractors must embrace modern solutions that accelerate development, enhance agility and simultaneously orchestrate hardware and software.
Digital engineering solutions, agile workflows, and model-based development approaches are helping A&D leaders tackle these challenges head-on. Here’s how leading organizations are adopting these solutions to stay ahead.
Speed Up Research and Development
A&D systems are increasingly defined by software-driven capabilities and the outcomes they deliver—meaning faster software development is of the utmost importance. To maintain this swift pace of innovation, product development teams are embracing agile workflows and optimizing processes to accelerate timelines and cut costs. PTC’s digital engineering solutions enable a modular approach to system design, allowing teams to perform system-level simulations with OSLC connectivity between PTC and third-party tools, achieve end-to-end traceability across the engineering lifecycle, and seamlessly integrate software and hardware requirements, testing, and workflows.
Ensure Compliance
The rise of software-driven capabilities in next-gen defense systems exposes A&D contractors to whole new swaths of industry standards, policies, and regulations, on top of hardware and mechanical regulations. Solutions that enable a centralized repository for requirements (ALM) and a design-for-compliance process (PLM) can help engineering teams integrate compliance into the development process as early as possible and ensure that software and hardware requirements are properly defined and aligned. These solutions also provide transparency and ease the ability to demonstrate compliance at every step of the development process.
Improve Collaboration
Seamless collaboration is essential for A&D leaders striving to build a sustainable competitive edge. By harnessing an authoritative source of real-time product data, manufacturers can eliminate silos, enhance interoperability, and create more efficient workflows—not only across internal teams, but also with external partners, suppliers, and stakeholders. Developing products for A&D programs often involves multiple contractors working together and collaborating with suppliers of components that make up the final product assembly. To succeed, teams must be able to securely and efficiently share and exchange engineering data while safeguarding their intellectual property. Successful A&D leaders harness digital collaboration to innovate faster, deliver higher-quality products, and maintain a competitive edge in a complex, interconnected ecosystem.
Manage Complexity and Variability
A&D products are highly complex, requiring precise engineering and integrating numerous advanced components. This complexity increases production time and costs. A model-based approach to development better manages the variability and customization of software and hardware components. Digital models serve as the core communication platform between engineering, manufacturing, quality, and other teams. Leading manufacturers are standardizing processes around digital product definitions. As a result, they are enhancing productivity and eliminating the complexity of multiple tools.
Scale Manufacturing
Lengthy delivery timelines for A&D products have led to record-high order backlogs for manufacturers. To keep pace with demand, manufacturers must accelerate production while minimizing quality issues, cutting costs, and reducing rework. Digital engineering solutions support production with an enterprise digital thread, meaning A&D leaders can ramp up processes to bring products to market faster—and avoid the logjam of costly backlogs.
Ensure Mission Readiness
Navigating the intricate demands of managing complex systems, maintaining mission readiness, and fostering innovation is no small feat for A&D OEMs. But OEMs are rising to the challenge, using a digital thread to seamlessly integrate engineering and service data across the product lifecycle. By optimizing collaboration and enabling rapid iteration, OEMs can improve mission readiness, accelerate innovation, and ensure their systems are always one step ahead in meeting the demands of complex, high-stakes operations.
Paris Air Show
PTC is thrilled to exhibit at the International Paris Air Show, June 16–22, at Paris Le Bourget Exhibition Center.
Discover MorePTC’s Digital Transformation Solutions for Aerospace and Defense
With 40 years of product development expertise and a world-class, interoperable digital engineering suite, PTC is at the forefront of helping customers design, manufacture, and sustain the world’s most complex and highly secured A&D systems. Many of our partners have deployed modern digital solutions to accelerate growth and readiness, including:
- Jacobs Engineering, which uses PTC’s cutting-edge CAD software to design and optimize NASA’s Exploration Portable Life Support System (xPLSS)—ultimately resulting in substantial fuel savings and improved astronaut mobility.
- Lufthansa Technik, which uses PTC's industry-leading product lifecycle management (PLM) and CAD solutions to significantly increase efficiency and transparency across the enterprise.
- GE Aviation, where implementing PTC’s high-performing service lifecycle management (SLM) solutions helped exceed their service revenue goals by 130%.
- US Air Force, where digital transformation initiatives paved the way for immersive training that proved significantly more effective than legacy methods.
PTC’s experience in the A&D sector has helped defense prime contractors speed innovation to the field for decades. By ramping up production and accelerating R&D timelines, defense organizations can more effectively deter threats to national security and manage the intricate complexities of software-driven products and systems—ultimately boosting agility to remain competitive in a rapidly evolving landscape. With PTC’s digital engineering solutions, A&D contractors are not just keeping pace with innovation—they’re leading the pack.
Discover PTC’s Next-Gen Aerospace and Defense Solutions
Don’t let outdated processes and tools hold your organization back in a rapidly evolving defense landscape. Discover how PTC solutions empower the A&D industry to accelerate R&D and enhance mission readiness.
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