Digital Transformation At Airbus North America

Dr. Alice de Casanove is leading sustainability governance at Airbus in the US as the subject matter expert for Airbus’s intrapreneurship culture. She played a crucial role in publishing the ISO reference on good practices in innovation management between 2013 and 2022 while serving as the ISO chair of the international standardization committee on innovation management (ISO 56000 series). In close collaboration with the WTO, OECD, WIPO, and World Bank, she brought together more than 70 nations. Casanove has a Ph.D. and graduated from Telecom ParisTech and is an Associated Researcher at the ERPI Lab.

Digital transformation has emerged as a critical business transformation program in today’s fast-paced, technologically advanced world for companies looking to stay agile and competitive. One of the top aerospace companies in the world, Airbus, has embraced this paradigm shift and started a digital transformation journey. Airbus North America has increased operational efficiency and solidified its position as an industry leader by strategically integrating people, data, and tools. In this article, we’ll look at how it built a digital transformation strategy around three key pillars.

The journey toward digital transformation began with strong leadership and a clear vision from top management. The purpose of the Digital Transformation Program is to create value by solving business issues with digital solutions. Airbus North America created a dedicated cross functional program to oversee digitization efforts and ensure alignment with the overall business strategy.

The company adopted agile methodologies and an iterative process. This enabled the business to provide value more quickly, continuously improve its solutions, and react quickly to shifting customer needs.

1.People Empowerment through a Collaborative Culture of Innovation

 People—their skills, mindset, and ability to adapt to change—are critical to a successful digital transformation. Leadership at Airbus recognized the importance of cultivating a collaborative culture that encourages innovation, digital literacy, and creativity. The outcomes of a series of design-thinking-based workshops with the support functions, core functions, and business teams helped create the digital transformation roadmap.

Airbus encouraged cross-functional teams to collaborate across departments, breaking down silos and facilitating information flow. It leveraged collective intelligence to drive meaningful change by empowering people to be change makers and providing a sense of ownership in digital transformation, especially with data management.

2. Harnessing Insights from Data for Informed Decision-making

Any digital transformation relies on stronger data management. Airbus recognized the importance of leveraging data from internal sources. Thanks to this data driven approach, the company gained a comprehensive understanding of its operations, customers, and market trends.

"The purpose of the Digital Transformation Program is to create value by solving business issues with digital solutions"

Airbus unlocked the potential of big data to drive informed decision-making by implementing advanced data analytics and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) capabilities.

With data analytics, businesses can transform unprocessed data into useful insights. It allows them to make wise decisions, spot patterns, trends, and correlations, and unearth actionable data to employ with their business strategies after analyzing and interpreting gathered data.

By locating bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and areas for improvement, data analytics enables organizations to optimize their operations and processes. Resource allocation and productivity improve as a result.

RPA bots can process data much more quickly than manual data entry, greatly cutting down processing times. They can work continuously without interruption or delays, allowing businesses to handle massive amounts of data instantly. RPA bots perform data tasks with high level accuracy, reducing human errors that are frequent in manual data entry. As a result, data quality is preserved and is kept consistent and reliable.

The company also optimized its production processes, supply chain management, and customer engagement thanks to real-time data insights, resulting in increased efficiency and cost savings.

3. Embracing Tools: Streamlining Operations by Digitalizing Processes

Airbus focused on selecting and implementing cutting edge digital tools and technologies once empowered people and data-driven insights were in place. The organization recognized that investing in the proper tools could significantly impact productivity, efficiency, and overall performance.

Airbus streamlined its data storage and sharing processes by leveraging cloud-based platforms and enabling seamless collaboration across teams and locations. This improved agility and responsiveness to market demands, which are critical in the aerospace industry.

Skywise is a cloud-based open data platform developed by Airbus that connects and centralizes data from various sources, such as maintenance logs, airlines, and aircraft. It enables optimization of aircraft performance and lowers maintenance costs through data analytics, predictive maintenance, and operational insights.

Airbus North America’s digital transformation journey displays how strategically integrating people, data, and tools can immensely improve a company’s operations, customer experience, and overall success. It ensured that the workforce played a critical role in driving change by equipping them with the necessary skills and cultivating an innovative culture. Using data-driven insights, the company was able to make more informed decisions, optimize processes, and improve safety and reliability. Finally, Airbus was able to streamline its operations and innovate products and services by adopting and embracing advanced digital tools.