Pratt & Whitney’s embrace of digitalization and data distribution throughout its organization has led to more efficiency in manufacturing, less waste, and better alignment with suppliers and customers, according to Jeana Thomas, the company’s vice president and global chief information officer. In a pre-show interview with AIN, Thomas added that Pratt’s digitalization efforts also have made employees’ jobs simpler and quicker to perform and empowered them to make critical manufacturing and business decisions more easily.
At the same time, P&W engages constantly with its suppliers and customers to help them automate their processes and, increasingly, work mutually to create design, supply-chain, sustainment, and operational improvements by sharing data, according to Thomas. Not only does that effort help create efficiencies for all throughout their businesses, but it helps eliminate human error, she said.
Like most large companies, P&W has worked to drive digitalization for many years. “We’ve had a really long roll-out of digital tools,” said Thomas. But today there remain many areas where P&W reckons increasing digitalization and automation will make its business still more efficient and customer-responsive while allowing the OEM and its entire supplier base to become more adaptable and agile to market requirements.
Internally, P&W strives to make its factories and parts-supply facilities as completely connected digitally as possible. The 1.2 million-sq-ft turbine airfoil manufacturing facility P&W plans to open in Asheville, North Carolina, in 2022’s fourth quarter will become its most connected, most automated factory ever. All the facility’s machines will connect digitally within its first year of operation, resulting in “data flowing to employees across the entire shop floor, [providing] ‘Industry 4.0’ capabilities,” said Thomas.
By going beyond the traditional siloed approach and sharing data with its suppliers to work cooperatively on parts designs, P&W’s design process has become faster and more efficient, she said. Sharing parts data throughout the company’s design, manufacturing, and inventory-sustainment operations allows its manufacturing and supply processes to become more automated and leaner, particularly in additive manufacturing, producing less waste and reducing CO2 emissions. Parts data-sharing also ensures P&W can provide “the right part, at the right time, at the right place, to deliver on our customer commitment,” said Thomas.
Additional supply-chain benefits arise from P&W’s interactive portal for suppliers. The portal makes administrative procedures easier and allows P&W to extract parts-standards data produced by suppliers. Knowing the exact standard for every part and providing two-way sharing of parts design and manufacturing-demand data improves predictability of parts quality and reliability of parts delivery for everyone.
This data also informs P&W’s sustainment operations, including the advanced, integrated supply-chain support center P&W said in March it will build in Bangalore. Parts-manufacturing and availability data hold a key to P&W’s drive to establish “a global supply-chain ecosystem” highly attuned to customer requirements, said Thomas.
So does the huge engine parts-configuration database in the company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, which forms part of P&W’s Customer Oriented Results & Excellence (CORE) operating system, she said. Together with the predictive-maintenance algorithms in the ERP system, the parts-configuration data that identifies every part in every engine model P&W makes helps enable CORE’s predictive lifecycle management (PLM) module to provide the company’s customers with predictive maintenance services.
Engine health monitoring functions provided by the advanced diagnostics and engine monitoring (ADEM) platform in Pratt’s EngineWise suite of aftermarket and MRO services also have proved critical to the company’s engine predictive maintenance capabilities. Together, the CORE PLM module and ADEM allow P&W to offer customers engine part “trend-monitoring and troubleshooting, and maximize time on wing,” she said, thereby enhancing customers’ maintenance-planning.
The EngineWise portal offers customers another P&W digital product designed to make engine maintenance information easier to access. Designed to automatically size its display to any device’s available screen size and definition and viewable via any popular Web browser using standard browser controls, P&W’s cloud-based interactive electronic technical publication (IETP) displays technical data stored on a DVD or external drive.
P&W’s efforts to make employees’ jobs easier by means of digitalization include other cloud-based services aimed at reducing workload. One service is an “insights-driven dashboard,” according to Thomas. This dashboard provides access to monthly billing information and a workflow tool designed to reduce the manual labor involved in billing operations. Another cloud-based service allows employees to manage contracts. The portal provides “a contractual system of record which has integrated, consistent ways to manage negotiation and administration,” she said.
Every effort to advance digitalization represents a major internal cultural change, according to Thomas. “I absolutely believe digitalization is critical to attracting the right talent going forward,” she said. “We’re making sure we’re upscaling it through the entire organization and along with our customers.”