Defense

Digitization plays a special role in the defense sector, as both the manufacture and the development of products can take place in consortia. The central challenge is digital consistency (digital thread), not only of the company's own processes, but also of the supply chain of the value creation partners. The basis for this is the creation of digital twins of the company's own processes and the integration capability of the supply chain partners. This enables solution scenarios to be identified for increasing supply security, ensuring conformity and making optimum use of the company's own capacities.

Digitalization is also of great importance in Aerospace & Defense for meeting ESG targets. Without digital support, ESG compliance will only be demonstrated at great manual expense.

Organizations must also be empowered with digital competencies to master the necessary transformations. Digitization does not only mean the introduction of technologies, but also the adaptation of organizational structures, the qualification of employees and the integration of new skills. These new skills and organizations offer the opportunity to retain new talent in modern workplaces.

At EFESO, we are pioneers in Industrie 4.0. Thanks to experience with digitalization projects in the Aerospace & Defense sector and an extensive partner network, we can support our customers in their digital transformation. Our expertise ranges from the development of a strategy roadmap to the implementation of individual solutions in the plants. In addition, we have the opportunity to provide targeted training and qualification for employees via our Learning Campus.

The global defense market has grown by an average of 10% per year in recent years. This trend is expected to continue in the future. Demand in Europe is growing faster than supply, which means that companies are constantly reaching their capacity limits. Pure company acquisitions do not provide a long-term solution here.

In addition to the challenges associated with the supply chain, the main focus is on the company's own limited human resources. In the Aerospace & Defense sector, we see the increase in personnel productivity as the greatest potential. The levers range from the systematic elimination of secondary activities to the implementation of state-of-the-art technologies to automate manual processes. In this way, existing capacities can be utilized more efficiently and output can be increased with the same use of resources.

EFESO supports your growth path with the necessary productivity enhancement programs. Our solutions range from selective bottleneck elimination to innovative production systems and processes to the factory of the future.

The combination of long development cycles in the traditional defense industry and short development cycles in software-driven start-ups forms the central challenge of the future. Among other things, this is due to modern defense scenarios. The networking, analysis and control of a wide variety of weapon systems in the field brings the software component to the fore. This changes the characteristics of the development processes. 

Our central approaches to shortening the time-to-market are:

• Introduction of increasing modularization and widespread implementation of intelligent platforms.
• Synchronization of hardware and software development processes
• consistent agile requirement management at the interfaces in the development consortia
• modern development environments and digital systems/platforms as a basic requirement for speed and quality of results

EFESO is able to comprehensively evaluate your company and identifies with you the potentials and the necessary steps. We help you to implement measures for products, processes and organizations under constant end-to-end consideration. With EFESO, you are able to comprehensively shorten your time-to-market.

The defense industry is characterized by special challenges in industrialization and production ramp-up. This is due on the one hand to high product individualization and complexity, and on the other to strict regulatory requirements. The consequences are reflected in insufficient product maturity levels at the planned start of production.

Key success factors to meet cost, time and quality targets are the following:

• Whitebook: Manual of good practices related to quantities, cost structure, automation, quality, etc.
• Cost of Delay: Comprehensive evaluation of alternative actions and prioritization of the right issues
• Simulation: verification and validation in a simulated environment to accelerate acceptance procedures
• Fast Feedback: early detection of errors in the product development process - rapid learning instead of rigid quality gates

The strategic framework for the above-mentioned success factors is formed on the one hand by an end-to-end view of R&D, production, purchasing and supply chain management as well as after sales, and on the other hand by a corresponding platform, module and common part strategy.

EFESO besitzt umfangreiche Erfahrungen mit erfolgreichen Industrialisierungen hinsichtlich Produkt, Prozess und Organisation – von der Konzepterstellung bis zur Umsetzung.