The future in the Aerospace and Defense industry demands faster product delivery and increasing product capability resulting in increased complexity in product design. U.S. government contracts and programs have begun to require digital engineering capabilities from implementation of DoD Instruction 5000.97 released in late 2023. RTX has been working on a multi-year Model-Based Enterprise (MBE) transformation initiative to leverage digital capabilities throughout the way in which we conduct our business and provide our products and services to customers, including how we design, build, and maintain our products and services and operate our facilities. Model-Based Definition, Manufacturing, and Inspection (MB-DMI) project focus on developing capabilities to,

• Reuse of validated MBD models to enable automation in manufacturing, quality, process planning and programming
• Leverage interoperable data standards to exchange data across heterogenous CAx applications
• Build the feature level digital thread with semantic data connectivity across DMI domains to uncover knowledge from production data

In-house demonstrations of these new digitalization capabilities have shown the value of cycle-time & cost reduction, and product quality improvement. The supply chain plays a key role in all of RTX’s product composition, our success in this MB-DMI transformation requires close collaboration with our suppliers on this journey.

Pratt & Whitney highlights lessons learned with MB-DMI deployments from pilots to full program execution while leveraging industry resources to upskill and prepare businesses for the Digital Transformation Journey. We offer an approach to assess and plan supplier‘s Model Based Maturity advancement with a key focus on Awareness, Capability, Readiness, and Adoption while leveraging Continuous Improvement.