Driving Defense Innovation With MBDA and PTC
00:05 I'm Matt Beaumont. I'm Director of Mechanical Engineering at MBDA. Our core range is absolutely critical to us as a business. We have tried and tested products that are there to support the armed forces around the world. And so in many areas, MBDA is really pushing the edge of what's possible with the technologies that we're engineering with. I think where the level of performance we strive to achieve and almost the extra effort you have to go to deliver that performance, means we're dealing with highly complex systems with huge, important tolerances and control characteristics.
00:35 There's no doubt that the complexity of what we do is also evolving, as well. So as time scales, it gets you shorter. We're into increasing complexity, both in terms of the diversity of the product range we're able to develop and also the type of engineering we do, so more advanced techniques. A big development program can be ten years in its development program, when we're really trying to get that down by 50% or so. So using as many techniques as we can skills based, tools based, manufacturing techniques, rapid development, rapid design, to get that
01:05 that ten years down to something, let's say 50%, is a challenge. The reuse of data is really important for us. We're trying to really improve the efficiency of the organization where we've got, as you scale up a business like we're doing at the minute, the ability to scale and maintain efficiency is really important. And driving the right tool to the right people. We're constantly trying to reduce cost to make different shapes, different forms. It's an engineering dream really, to be able to do that in the in the products that we've got and using new tools and techniques to help us with that, as well.
01:36 So we've been using the Windchill product for a number of years now. We call it Matrix inside MBDA.It's a capability, a toolset we introduced a few years ago, and that's been immensely valuable. We've got aerospace engineering has its nuances in terms of the needs to compartmentalize information. We work across multiple networks. Sovereignty is absolutely the heart of what MBDA does. We work at high levels of classification, and we work in a sovereign environment. So the ability for us to be able to share data in a controlled way is really important to us, and the PTC product allows us to do that. So the way that we host the Windchill product in each country,
02:07 the way that we're able to synchronize the data that we're able to share between each nation helps us engineer on collaborative programs. We've got nearly 13,000 users now of product data inside MBDA. About 60% of our workforce is engineers using the product. So it's really important that we have good discipline in the way that we use the product and good data in the right place. Over the last few years, we've been working more closely with PTC for our logistics solutions. So the NTIP product for our support engineers based on MPMLink and also more recently the digital industrialization platform,
02:39 again using MPMLink that allows us to manipulate the 3D models in the manufacturing environment and have a bi directional link and control characteristics. All of those under the pressure that we're under today to deliver will help the engineers deliver more. Once the products developed and manufactured, that support team have a huge task in making sure our customers get what they need. So now when those systems in support phases, that's where we're introducing the NTIP program again, based on MPMLink, has been really useful to us.
03:09 As MBDA continues to deliver more products to more customers than ever, the support function becomes really, really critical for us. We've got multiple systems in the field being used day in, day out, and so the ability for us to respond is absolutely critical. So deploying Windchill, deploying MPMLink into the NTIP solution has been a valuable part of our customer support.