Aerospace Manufacturers operate high numbers of individual yet interconnected engineering processes during the manufacture of parts and systems for aircraft. Each of those processes rely on multiple requirements and data points gathered from customer, internal and industry specifications and standards.

Gathering those requirements and data points (and then maintaining them) takes an extraordinary amount of time and effort, particularly from industry standards, because those specifications and standards are currently delivered to users as PDF documents, with the information within them being hard to discover, interpret, transform and implement.

The path for information from industry standards to become part of a customer’s work instruction on the shop floor is tortuous, unreliable, prone to differences in interpretation and error leading to, at best, delays, unnecessary costs and rework and at worst serious safety or compliance issues.

SAE International, as part of the SAE ITC Digital Standards Alliance is proposing a future where those requirements are provided to manufacturers in formats that enable them to be applied at the point of need, removing ambiguity and uncertainty and reducing the amount of human intervention required to deliver each individual engineering process.

This session would describe the logical sequence of events needed to achieve this and the challenges and opportunities that this presents, and how a new industry consortia, The Digital Standards Alliance, is making it its mission to address these challenges.