(calm music)
(plane engine)
- [Mark] Welcome to One Aviation.
A maker of very light jets.
In the highly competitive world of aviation,
it's not enough to just make an innovative product.
You have to make that product better,
faster, more efficiently than your competitors.
That means leaving nothing to chance.
Long before the pre-flight check list
and physical evaluations,
before test flights and production runs,
One Aviation has already run this plane through its paces.
That's because it's been designed and tested
in what's being called the digital thread.
Luckily, a few One Aviation team members agreed
to meet me here early this morning to talk about it.
Hey guys.
- [Ryan] Good morning.
- [Mark] What's going on.
- Well today we're preparing to go fly.
- [Mark] That's Ryan Jennings.
Director of Structural Systems Engineering
here at One Aviation.
He'll be my guide on how the digital thread
weaves its way through this operation.
You guys aren't freaked out about this?
- Not a bit.
- How do you know?
Like how do you know that this is going to work?
- [Ryan] Almost every piece of this airplane has a digital
representation or maybe what you would refer to
as a digital twin. - [Mark] Yeah.
- But we know pretty much everything about this plane.
There's nothing we don't know about it.
- So you've tested this plane in the virtual world
before you ever...
- Absolutely.
- ...Fly it in the real world.
- It's not just the physical pieces
that you see that are coming together as an assembly,
it's a simulation along the digital thread of also,
the manufacturing process, the inspection process,
the qualification process.
All that stuff there's a theme here
that goes along with we want to know
what happens before it really happens in the real world.
(curious music)
- Okay, so what is the digital thread?
And can it really help One Aviation thrive
in the competitive category of very light jets?
To help define it, we've assembled this visualization.
The digital thread is a single seamless strand
of data and computing power that stretches all the way
from cradle to grave for a product.
It give you the ability,
not just to monitor something in a linear fashion,
but to take learnings along the way
and feed them back into the next generation
of whatever object we're making.
It could change everything.
Washington, DC.
It's where my journey along the digital thread begins.
Because it's where I find my colleagues,
Kelly Marchese and Mark Vitale.
Kelly and Mark have been leading the charge for Deloitte,
on this notion of the digital thread.
How do you think we got here?
Maybe I start with you Kelly, cause you've really
sponsored and spear-headed this effort since the beginning.
- I think what has sparked the interest
is there's such a need.
Particularly in the department on defense,
because they have such a complexity of people,
and locations, and equipment
that aren't necessarily connected.
And so there's this aspiration to be able to leverage
additive manufacturing to solve a really big problem.
And then realizing it's not about
the individual piece of equipment,
it's about the connection of those.
Almost every meeting I was in, our clients, you know,
and people that we were talking with were asking about this.
Were really engaged into that topic.
Intellectually curious, pulling us into the conversation.
We were having, it hasn't been figured out.
And that's an exciting part of this as well.
Is to be at the forefront of being able to design it,
develop it, leverage technologies that never existed before.
And so, the art of the possible today
couldn't have even been imagined
a couple of years ago.
- We have been talking about this for decades.
- About substituting information for inventory,
or for capital in general.
Why didn't we do it, why isn't it done already?
- You know, you're talking about terabytes of data
that can flow through a digital thread.
So the computing power is in
the capacity to process information,
is significantly advanced where it was,
you know five, ten years ago.
Competitive pressures continue to ratchet.
So you're always looking for new ways to either
innovate and or take cost out of your business.
- You know as a consumer,
we're so used to getting exactly what we want
when we want it, and now there's a human expectation
that we're now applying in business.
And going, well if I can have that on the consumer side,
why can't that be applied in my business setting,
in my manufacturing setting.
Why does it have to be so constrained?
- If I'm the leader of a large organization,
why do I need digital thread?
- It compresses the supply chain from
days, weeks, months, and some cases years to zero.
- There's that 10, 20, 30% productivity bump in front of us
if we can this notion of digital thread right
because what we're going to learn?
- I think so.
You mean you take time and latency out of the supply chain.
- It's no longer linear.
It really feeds into this idea
that's digital supply network.
Things are feeding back much more quickly
and the organizations that do that well are going to win.
- [Mark] So can the digital thread really help
companies win?
Well, that's what I'm going to find out.
With help from our friends back in Albuquerque.
(curious music)