Horizontal vision and strategy

Competing on the current and next generations of defense and civil programs will require aerospace companies to embrace new and increasingly flexible business processes, according to IBM.

For a business to be truly successful it takes more than a strong management team to succeed, though that certainly helps. Today it takes strategic agility-or the ability to see across broad horizontal processes-to mine a broad range of operational data sources to learn and nimbly apply knowledge quickly to manufacturing, supply-chain, and field-service initiatives. For this reason, contemporary aerospace companies are aggressively turning to integrated digital engineering, production, supply-chain, and aftermarket solutions as they transform themselves into e-business-on-demand companies that exhibit a characteristic responsiveness, variability, focus, and resiliency.

A handful of companies are doing groundbreaking advances in this area, linking traditional silos with streamlined business processes and federating data across traditional process handoffs for true collaboration. Collaboration can be enhanced through advanced outsourcing capabilities that turn the fixed costs of these processes to a variable service expense while providing an effective means to finance long-term technical improvements, such as the long-term purchase of new large applications.