In a Q&A session, Srinath Jonnalagadda, Autodesk’s vice-president of business strategy for design & manufacturing tells Aerospace Manufacturing how the company helps its customers capture and share knowledge.

Q: How does your PLM platform help the aerospace sector change its systems of work for the better, reduce the top and bottom lines, improve processes, mitigate risk and create a workforce that really hums?

At Autodesk, we work with almost all the key aerospace manufacturing companies in at least some capacity, such as Airbus, Firefly Aerospace, and APWorks. For example, Greenpoint Technologies, a Boeing Business Jet Completion Centre, relies on our Fusion 360 Lifecycle platform to manage the complexity of tracking its products, improving its engineering processes, and encouraging better collaboration within its teams.

Ultimately, PLM solutions help aerospace manufacturers work more holistically across all different silos and departments. Many, however, are still using disconnected software solutions to develop and create products, with complicated workflows. In many instances, collaboration happens through file sharing across emails and spreadsheets, resulting in wasted material, energy and inventory. In fact, up to 70% of spare parts never leave the shelf and roughly one-third of an engineer’s time is spent on tasks like recreating data, recording data in different places, searching for different versions and communicating changes.

PLM solutions help break down silos, bringing design and manufacturing closer together. This means starting with data at the centre, making it easy to share and connect it with every stakeholder at every stage of the processes. By connecting these workflows – from design and mechanical engineering to electronics, simulation and manufacturing – entire teams can collaborate seamlessly. Bridging this gap helps reduce waste and provides actionable insights that manufacturers can use to get their products to market faster.

These process improvements are critical. Fusion 360 Lifecycle collects data on the processes used to plan, define, build, support, and improve products and services. Over the course of the product lifecycle, nearly everyone in the enterprise will play a role. It’s impossible to overstate the importance of these processes to the overall health of a company.

Furthermore, now that many companies are embracing remote work, teams aren’t co-located any more, which can make it difficult to collaborate. But, through cloud-based PLM systems, information is all captured in the same system. It’s like being in the same room, as anyone can log in from anywhere and start working as if they were sat together in person.

Q: Do you see an opportunity for far greater information commonality and reuse?

Information commonality and reuse is absolutely key. If you’re only able to connect certain platforms or solutions, then it becomes impossible to collaborate seamlessly. Our belief is that if we only connect Autodesk solutions together, we’ll have failed in our quest to improve collaboration across design and manufacturing.

Migrating an organisation’s legacy data sitting in all of these legacy systems through to a new business platform can be very time-consuming and costly. How do you go about helping customers make the transition and wean them off their comfort blanket of legacy systems?

This is a key feature of the Any CAD function within Autodesk’s Fusion 360. It provides seamless access between models from other CAD software in their original format, and the advanced tools and technology needed to embrace the future of making.

We also provide a simple desktop connector which can link up legacy systems in the cloud platform, enabling the rest of the ecosystem to work with that data. This transition from the perpetual, legacy model to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is something that Autodesk has been leading the way on.

Q: How are you challenging the customers’ perceptions to make these changes when they’ve been doing things a certain way for the last few decades?

We always want to challenge our customers’ perceptions of what’s possible. When we first introduced Fusion 360 Lifecycle in 2012, data management and collaboration was the default setting within the software, which at the time was ground-breaking. This is now something that’s expected, and we are continuing to push forward our vision of a common data platform.

Q: It could be argued that increasing manufacturing efficiencies is all about doing more with less people. The obvious societal danger here is that people need to work, but with fewer jobs, towns have their hearts and souls ripped out of them. I’m interested to know how you would counter the argument that automation is taking over?

The future of automation in manufacturing is bright: it in fact helps us meet the challenges we face as a global society by augmenting human strength and ingenuity.

From machinery simplifying the process of repetitive work and heavy lifting, to technologies like generative design using infinite computer power to create and validate geometry for a given set of constraints, automation is set to affect every stage of the manufacturing process. Ultimately, automation helps people focus on creative, value-add work rather than spending time trawling through data.

However, we cannot ignore the concerns of those who may be worried about the implications of automation on jobs, so one way of tackling this is through ‘reverse-mentoring’. We’ve found that younger workers tend to be more open to automation and also find it easier to use the latest technology. Older workers are matched up with younger employees, who can mentor them on navigating the changing work environment and teach them how to use different technologies to overcome obstacles.

Q: Some PLM platforms look to enable virtual validation of the entire manufacturing process. Are you seeing positive signs that it mitigates issues where experienced people leave or retire from an organisation, but the people left behind find it difficult to fill the void left?

Absolutely. This often happens because all the different teams are disconnected – from quality management to NPI. This means that teams responsible for problem identification, corrective actions, or recommendations don’t work efficiently together. As a result, product developers often don’t have full visibility into reliability issues that need to be addressed or updated.

When you have all this information in one central, easily accessible location, it is much easier to improve products quickly and between departments. A PLM platform allows this data to be harnessed, ensuring mistakes are not repeated and errors are quickly flagged.

This also means that if someone leaves the organisation, they don’t take that knowledge with them – it’s kept in the same place and is accessible to all. This is a great demonstration of the importance of the democratisation of data, as this makes it easy for non-data experts to benefit from a simple platform.

www.autodeskfusionlifecycle.com