How Safran Aero Boosters Leverage Industry 4.0

00:00 Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Jean-Louis Zachary. I'm the chief data officer of Safran Aero Booster. And my colleague. I'm Al and I, the manufacturing 4.0 leader in the same company. So we are part of Safran Safran Company. So Safran is an international technology group. It's the world number three aerospace company. We have more than 83,000 employees all around the world,

00:32 and we have mainly five core businesses his aircraft, propulsion, aircraft, equipment, aircraft, interiors, defense and space. We are a part, myself, of Safran Aero Booster , which is one of Safran companies. We are located in Belgium. We have we are around 1500 people working there. You see the picture of the main side. But we have also different companies for us in the United States.

01:05 So we have Safran test cells and we have also Safran Systems. So Safran Aero Boosters has four main activities, and that's the reason why we have different different sides. So we have we have some numbers about the revenue of the of the company. So aero booster, we have four different activities. So the name booster comes from the low pressure compressor of the aircraft engine. That's the main product that we design and manufacture on on the site in Belgium.

01:40 But we have also other activities. The second one is the old system activities. So we have the design and the production of all the system parts such as the lubrication unit and also the oil tank and some oil exchanger as well. The third activities is test cells, so our teams design and deliver buildings dedicated to testing engine parts components

02:11 or sometimes complete engine as well. And these these building are all around the world. So we have a lot of customers, around 50 different customers for this kind of buildings. And the last activities is the space valves. We have also the design and the manufacturing of space valves for mainly the Ariane launcher, the space, the European launcher,

02:41 and that's the company. So we have decided to present you today the way we have organized the digital transformation, and we will make a focus mainly on the selection we've made for the MMS software because it's based on PTC product. And we try to explain why we have made this this choice. And personally, it's important for me to to explain you that it's part of a bigger picture of a bigger strategy, a complete digital transformation.

03:14 And we will try to show you how PTC helped us to achieve this goal. So we have analyze the company and the different activities that are on the company and we can summarize this. This kind of schematics normally is applicable to any company, not only ours. So it's really generic. And this way to organize the activities is meant because I'm a chief data officer, it's important for me to put in place a system where we can do data governance,

03:49 make sure that the data is unique. We have a unique source of truth. So this this schematics is meant for that. So we have the green rectangles. First on the left, you see the customer. There are people interacting with customers and then they try to find customers, they do marketing, then they do the sales. They and then they launch the project. We have the design activities, of course, so design engineer,

04:22 but also manufacturing engineers. Then once this activities is done, we go to the manufacturing area of the company where we have the machines, the operators and so on. We have the supply chain people and so on and so on. You see, using this kind of schematic, you can separate data so that there is no redundant information. So this is how we analyze the different activities we have, the maintenance,

04:54 it's not that present in every booster activities. Below, you have the resources that are mandatory to perform these activities. We need human resources. We need purchases. We need, of course, information technology. We need site management. And on top of that, you have all the governance activities, administration and quality. So why am I showing this to you today? It's because in our digital transformation we have heard

05:28 a lot about digital threat here during the LiveWorx. Personally, we have different digital threats , not only one. So if we speak now in terms of software that are aligned with these activities, we will use, for example, for interaction with the customer, we can talk about CRM, customer relationship management. We have, of course, the famous ERP enterprise resource planning.

06:01 The PLM, The RMS. So you see, when we organize the activity, the digital activities of a company, we can have software dedicated to this part without having some kind of with a single source of information. We can separate them and make them talk to each other. So for us, of course, it's important that every box received the right software.

06:31 This is the first digital threat, and it's not the one that is presented by PTC. Generally, they say the digital threats start from the design office. We think of 3D models, drawings, and then we go to the manufacturing and then to the service. But this is the case when you start a new project, but once it's in production, you have another digital threat. Customer ask for part and then other people, logistics, supply chain people start to work on it and there is

07:03 a digital threat at this place also. The second one here is the one that is really referred here during the LiveWorx. It's the it's the engineering threat, I would say. And in what we can see on this schematic, that these two different loops, threats have a junction, the contact on the manufacturing level on the shop floor. And this is where the RMS is really important to be able to close these two

07:37 different loops because we currently already have an ERP, we have some kind of PLM. But in our company the manufacturing activities are mainly with paper. We have machine of course, but no gathering of data, no software for the RMS. So for us the RMS is really the key to close these two digital loops. In search for software that could be used to close this loop or for this we have

08:09 a scan, the web, the literature, literature and so on. And we have found the Isa 95 standard, which has been designed for that. It's a standard meant to to to to, to deal with the activities that are between the machine, the shop floor and the high level software such as the ERP and the PLM. So if you are interested in putting in place a software, I would strongly recommend that you read this standard because it provides

08:43 a model that we can see here on the on the right. Eight activities linked to each other with a certain logic. Detailed scheduling Dispatching execution management. This is a vertical a vertical activity. The ERP says I need 20 parts. Then it goes to detail scheduling. We organize the people working on the shop floor based on the status of the production. Okay, I will organize. Then they will dispatch and execute.

09:15 Execution management is where you will have the screen for the operators so that it received all the the production order that it has to do today. On the right you see data collection and this is where we will focus today. Data collection is where you connect to your shop floor to gather all the information. When you do that, then you can feed the analysis part of the of the software. And this is where you can find dashboards and so on.

09:48 You can also feed the tracking so that you generate the report for quality and for feedback to the ERP. And you see on the left resources management and definition management, these are mandatory for everything to work. Definition management, you will get the connection with the PLM and resources management. Generally, it will be made inside the ERP. So we have started by this particular activity. It's data collection.

10:19 If we if I want to, to get value from my data, I need to get this data. So what can we use for data collection and what kind of analysis can we can we get? But for us, it's important that we cover at the end the complete list of these activities. We don't want just to collect and analyze data. We want to have detailed scheduling, dispatching, tracking and so on. And we have tested different software for that.

10:50 And none of them on the market covers everything until we have discovered and because we have selected after a benchmark, we have selected singers as the software for the Iot platform, the software to collect data. And we have started to work with PTC and to connect our machine and get and develop our own dashboard with our own logic. Until in the in PTC roadmap we have seen this, this new feature.

11:23 What is interesting for us is that PTC decided to put on top of ThingWorx what they have named the building blocks. So you must know that on the ISO 95 standard it comes with a data model which has been generated in XML by the the company and it's called be to Business to Manufacturing Markup Language PTC has decided to incorporate these building blocks on top of ThingWorx. It's part of ThingWorx.

11:56 It means that if you develop application with these blocks, they will be fully compliant with the ISO 94 and therefore you will be able to communicate with ERP, PLM and other system because you are following the standard. So you must you can make the comparison between this and Lego blocks For those who have kids, it's the same. So you can with this block, you can build your own application by on your own and it will work. But and that's what you can see here with the gray rectangle,

12:29 for example. But on top of that, PTC developers have also started to build their own application and then you can purchase directly if you want some application to save you time. You don't have to build your your, your toy yourself with the Lego blocks you can purchase directly a good Star Wars toy with specific parts. Of course, with this specific part you will be limited possibly to.

12:59 You will not move from one aircraft to a boat. If you want to, but still you save time and you have really, really quickly an application that can give you value. So for us, that's really what is interesting. So we will present you some examples of what we are currently doing with PTC and what is interesting and encourage you to to have a look at this. This extract of PTC roadmap, they really a strategy to progressively

13:31 provide the different modules. So you see there are asset optimization modules, workforce productivity, speed to manufacturing, quality improvement. So these are different blocks that will progressively be available. And in the center you have digital performance management. It's DPM, DPM will come on top of that and we'll get information from all these applications to provide you a unified dashboard to know what's going on on the shop floor.

14:01 So this is what we really found interesting. This is we have based our strategy on this, these tools and my colleague will now present you some examples of what we are currently doing right now. Thank you for this presentation. I will now show you where we are exactly in that journey towards our digital transformation in Safa Booster. So here you can see a simplified schematic of our architecture

14:34 and how we are connecting our machine. Using PTC product above our machine, we are placing two PTC technology, its edge micro server and Kepware edge. Micro server is used to gather files coming from our machine. So historically we have a lot of of equipments that are not connected to real time series data, but they are just writing files of all these what happens on the machine, measuring characteristic and so on.

15:04 And so it has very high, high dead value here to collect all these files and structure this data. And of course we have Kepware to connect to our machine in order to gather real time series. And then we are just reading all the data with the ThingWorx platform here and just structuring and storing the data into different database. First one is standard SQL database, that is the Microsoft Server SQL,

15:34 but it can also be Postgre and we have no SQL database for every time series. And it is we have selected influx which is directly compatible with singers. And as soon as all this data is available here in this database, then we can just make it available also in a data warehouse to just cross join with PLM data ERP data and so give added value. So in order to just analyze all this data, we are using mainly two different software.

16:09 Our Power BI, as you may know, and also rapidminer for more advanced analysis when we need deep learning decision trees and so on in order to better understand our data. So that's our architecture. And I will show you now a few application that we have built on ThingWorx to, to be more practical. So in order to be a bit more interactive,

16:41 I will switch to the ThingWorx application that we have built. So here we can see a map of our of our company and there is a few, sorry, a few later that we are able to, to put on top of this, of this company shop floor here you can see in green all the equipment that we have already connected. So it's about a third of all our major equipment that are right now connected. And by the end of 2024, it should be fully connected.

17:17 What we are able to do on on also this map is to be able to have an overview of all the maintenance interventions on all our machines. And of course we are also ready with this map to be able to localize our parts in the in the in our company. But that's not yet ready. So as I have mentioned during the the my presentation, we are gathering a lot of files that are we are all

17:47 the measurements coming from our parts. And so there is a huge need of doing statistical process control. And so thanks to ThingWorx, we have gathering gathered all this information in a very structured SQL database and here it's probably that is pointing directly towards this database. And so the engineering department in our company is able to have a very quick overview of all the characteristics. So here it's a classic control card and just a diagram of

18:20 the distribution of characteristic. What is a bit more advanced is that we are able also to be able to compare all the distribution based on what machine has manufacturer parts. So we are just linking data that is collected during manufacturing to data that is collecting at the final inspection. So that was a use case. We are also using RTM in order to monitor all our machine.

18:51 So in the in the presentation of Jean-Louis, you have seen that we are going towards a full mass and right now there is a three main application that are available in the PTC portfolio. This RTM, EMU and Connected Vercel and RTM is the first one that we have begin to deploy. And so right now there are seven machines that are currently connected and so we are monitoring all the statue, all. All the alarms on this machine. And we are trying to help people improve the overall efficiency of the equipment.

19:27 So there is also another another use case that we have been deployed is the energy monitoring, because energy prices are rising quite quickly in our country. And so we need to be very proactive on this topic. And so we have connected a lot of our energy sensors. We are gathering data and here you can see that we can quickly see which area in the company is consuming the most energy. And then you can just analyze everything more in details and to see

20:01 the variation day by day, hour by hour. And this is made possible very quickly using just a simple Kepware technology. We are connecting the the our our sensor and storing every data into our database. And as soon as the data is available in the database, then you are already ready for basic analysis. And thanks to this data, we are going to more advanced energy and monitoring systems. So the last one oh, they have started machine . That's right.

20:34 So that's a cockpit of six machine in our in our shop floor. And so this cockpit has been fully developed in ThingWorx. That's the first application we have. We have developed. And so here the aim is for the operator to see key characteristic of the machine. You have to check before he is actually launching a production on the machine. And there is also features to be able to declare several operation on the machine.

21:06 So you are able just to select maintenance, grieving or or something like this. And that's operation that they want to track. And of course we have an historic history of all these interventions and so it can be reused afterwards. So that's a very short showcase of a few applications. If you are interested in one of them, we can have a talk afterwards. So the the last one I will present, but it is currently in development.

21:39 It's our connected versal application. That's really the key feature of the MMS software. As Jean-Louis has mentioned, the MMS will close the loop, the two digital threads loop. And so what we are trying to do right now is to be able to connect, connected Vercel to our ERP and PLM software and to develop the connected tools, the certification management and so on.

22:09 And so right now we are currently busy on this topic. We hope that at the end of the year we will be able to have a fully operational proof of value and then afterwards deploy it in our company more, more deeply. Then I will just let Jean-Louis conclude our presentation. Thank you. So as you have probably understood, the maze is the key really, because generally in companies you have an ERP. Most companies have one.

22:43 If you have a design office, you have CAD tools already. Most of all, you have people familiar with software. Their job, their day to day job is to use a computer so then you can improve the software. But in terms of people management, it's not that difficult. On a shop floor, people don't have computers. They are workers. So there you have a difficulties also to to bring the technology there. So it's really important that we provide them with something efficient, simple,

23:13 flexible and so on. So the RMS is really we are talking about the Golden Triangle, really. You will not close the loop if you don't have an operational. That's our belief. At least we have selected ThingWorx for PTC and ThingWorx for initially for ThingWorx and Kepware because Kepware has a lot of different connectors. But really the the key, the key point in PTC strategy was to incorporate the ISO 95 standard within ThingWorx

23:44 and to start to provide software pieces of software to help us accelerate this deployment of the RMS. So that's really the key point. So for at this stage, we have presented you where we are at the moment, the next challenge. We have some features of the ISO 95 that are collection analysis. We are starting to collect with the PLM, but there is no traceability, for example. That's something we have to discuss with PTC. We need something like that.

24:15 The detailed scheduling as well, sometimes called APS for advanced planning and scheduling system we have to interact with with a PLM that is not a PTC PLM. So sometimes it's important also because with PTC you have an ecosystem, but most of the time you will be forced to use other software. And what we like with PTC philosophy is above the software is the openness. You don't hear that for every software supplier. And for us it's really important.

24:48 It's in their DNA and of course interface with the ERP. But knowing that we are using ISO 95 standard , normally it should be easy. We have not done yet because we are switching our ERP, we are moving to SAP, so that's why there is no connection already. And then of course later interfaces with the QMS, the Mme. So you see this single RMS is really the source of everything and, and it's really important for a complete digital transformation of the company.

25:20 Thank you for your attention. Have a good day.