Overcome the challenges of cost and sustainability
High fuel costs, the need for innovative defense systems and the move towards net-zero greenhouse gas emissions are among the main challenges facing aerospace manufacturers in the 2020s.
However, the company and the industry in general were affected by large changes in demand and costs. The COVID-19 crisis has sent shockwaves through commercial aviation, sending revenue plummeting. But with demand growing again, an estimated 6 billion passengers are expected to fly annually by 2030. At the same time, weak oil prices are hitting commercial aviation, while international conflicts are stressing the need for advanced defense systems.
A major manufacturer of electrical systems, the company serves customers worldwide throughout the airline, military and energy industries. Manufacturing electrical systems is a very complex process that involves the successful integration of thousands of components from dozens of suppliers.
Manufacturers must strike the right balance between the need for high performance and reliability while remaining competitive from a pricing perspective and complying with strict regulations regarding data safety and security. Underlying these operations is the company’s global IT network of thousands of applications.
“Developing next-generation power systems takes years of research and development and huge amounts of computing power,” said the company’s group chief information officer. “Given the many challenges in the market, we need to find new ways to address high fixed costs, and part of that is reducing legacy technical debt.”
The company is undergoing a business transformation that places a strong focus on the digitalization of legacy systems. However, the transition to a more flexible cloud-based infrastructure is not straightforward. The industry faces strict country-specific regulations and security frameworks that restrict data usage across geographies. Those export license controls regulate the nationality of the people who can handle the data and affect decisions about whether the data can be hosted in a private cloud or a public cloud.