The influence of digital manufacturing continues to realize momentum at Boeing. As a neighborhood of our second-century initiatives to accelerate productivity and growth, there's a deeper specialization in how we are maximizing our digital capabilities to enable a more dynamic workforce and improve first-time quality during aircraft production.
This is an exciting time for growth across the industry because the idea of producing excellence transforms into an idea that's more hooked in to leveraging the proper technologies at the proper time and adopting a more holistic approach. Digital manufacturing is all about capturing those processes that leverage precision and repose on our competency and expertise. What I find most fascinating about this subject is how quickly certain technologies are putting the facility into the hands of those who need it most in real-time–technicians and support teams performing on the factory floor.
One major digital manufacturing capability that we are rapidly implementing is Production Analytics, which has proven to play a big role within the way we better equip our employees to perform daily. Our production analytics capabilities integrate various legacy IT systems with new data visualization and predictive/ prescriptive analytics technologies and are helping Boeing unlock efficiencies across our end-to-end value stream. With these new digital technologies, production analytics helps our technicians and therefore the teams that support them to:
• receive early warnings of potential part shortages and prescribe actions to the proper team member to stop them
• predict safety, quality, and price-performance
• assess in real-time job performance, manufacturing risks, and disruption, and
• visualize manufacturing flow, bottlenecks, and machine performance
At Boeing, we launched our first successful Google Glass pilot in 2016. Since then, we’ve invested longer in understanding the intricacies of this tool including the way to best manage a virtual database of data.