P&W Takes Digitization Benefits to The Next Level

Pratt & Whitney recently unveiled an ambitious digitalization strategy. In one decade, it should allow all of the engine maker’s supply chain, manufacturing, engineering and aftermarket customer support operations to interact in an integrated manner to produce efficiencies and reduce turnaround times throughout its business.

“Digitalization is nothing new for Pratt & Whitney. This is an evolution, not a revolution,” said Julianne LeBlanc, Pratt & Whitney’s chief information officer in late May, as she introduced reporters to five aspects of the U.S.-based group’s digitalization effort at the company’s annual media event. For instance, said LeBlanc, the company has used digital interfaces for its machine tools for a long time.

However, “Until you can connect the entire value chain end-to-end digitally, you can’t realize the full benefits of digitalization,” Pratt & Whitney president Robert Leduc told reporters. So connecting every aspect of Pratt & Whitney’s operations digitally is among the company’s “more strategic efforts.” He added, however, “realistically it will take seven to 10 years to connect them end-to-end. But that’s where we’re headed and where we’re putting some of our investment.”

Pratt & Whitney’s digitalization effort includes introducing, over time, greatly more automated engine assembly lines. The first automated line the company opened was the horizontal assembly line operated by Pratt & Whitney Canada at it Mirabel Aerospace Center, which assembles the PW1500G geared turbofan engines powering all Bombardier C Series aircraft.

This facility reduced production lead-time from four weeks to two weeks. According to Leduc, this approach generates a lot less scrap material than traditional lines and involves 80 percent fewer people. “One individual is responsible for 80 percent of the entire [production] cell for turbine disk assembly,” he explained. This person controls the line’s assembly robots and providing statistical control and oversight of the manufacturing machines. “In the past, we did it blindly and only measured [for tolerance quality] after the part was made. Now we do it all in real time.”

Connected Factory

Automating its assembly lines forms just part of one of Pratt & Whitney’s biggest digitalization initiatives: its connected factory system. This connects every manufacturing method, material, machine and, once it enters a factory and are recognized by its sensors, every part that Pratt & Whitney uses. This llows the company to predict production issues before they happen.

“With the connected factory, we know exactly where a part is, on what machine and when,” said Leduc. For instance, using connected factory, each morning the company’s production managers will be able to find out instantly “what we produced last night.” Pratt & Whitney will pilot its Connected Factory system on a high-pressure turbine module assembly line later this year, Leduc revealed.

Another key aspect of Pratt & Whitney’s digitalization effort, its command center, is already in operation. Located at its East Hartford headquarters in Connecticut, “the command center is able to tell us, by [each individual] engine, where a part [delivery] promise is” from any supplier, said Leduc. “Before, we couldn’t validate a part commitment. You can’t live that way in a high-volume [production] environment.”

Over the past year, Pratt & Whitney has hired 300 additional supply chain staffers to go to its suppliers and ensure they all report to the command center via Pratt & Whitney’s supplier portal on how that supplier is performing on its parts-delivery commitments

For its own use (suppliers aren’t linked to the system yet), Pratt & Whitney has automated this vast undertaking by means of its ‘Qlik’ (pronounced ‘click’) platform. Today providing 25 different display dashboards but already planned to expand to more than 80, Qlik allows supply chain managers to look deeply, specifically and in real time into any aspect of its supply chain activities, allowing them (for instance) to promptly find any risk indicators in Pratt & Whitney’s supply chain. Through using Qlik the company says it is already seeing supply chain improvements.

Visual Engine

Another major element of the digitalization drive at Pratt & Whitney is its Visual Engine system. Meant to be used by the company’s 5,000 engineers, this system will provide Google-like search capabilities for every part number Pratt & Whitney has used in its engines ever since the beginning of the jet age. Visual Engine, whose vast database of part numbers will be updated automatically from the parts data sources and indexed by the engineers themselves, will let engineers research part-number histories immediately to understand and rectify failures.

One of its main functions is to allow faster turnaround times for parts-related customer-support activities. So flexible are the system’s search capabilities that engineers don’t even need to know a part number to find it quickly: they merely need to know its general geometry, or the kind of part it is. If they have a part number for a related part, they can research its history to find out more about the performance history of the part they are researching.

EngineWise is Pratt & Whitney’s major aftermarket digitalization initiative. Using the company’s eFAST aircraft health monitoring system, EngineWise will provide predictive maintenance analytics and tools—such as a video borescope tool—accessible worldwide for resolving customer issues in real time, as well as new and more transparent channels for communications with customers. It will offer an Internet-of-Things environment for both legacy and new Pratt & Whitney products, as well as a customizable customer portal and services for technical documents, information exchanging and warranty elements.

The fifth Pratt & Whitney digital initiative highlighted at the pre-Paris Air Show media event is RIDII (Report It, Don’t Ignore It), the company’s first mobile app. Deployed in multiple languages to employees worldwide, RIDII will encourage and allow employees to report immediately a potentially hazardous condition anywhere on Pratt & Whitney property, rather than requiring them to find a computer terminal to report a potential hazard. In this way, the company expects, more hazards will be reported and each will be mitigated more quickly.