Applying Service Oriented Architecture in the Aerospace Industry

(SMEs) involved in the Aviation industry. The goal of the initiative is to offer a solution that wouldprovide safe and correct collaboration base fostering innovation process of Airbus and supportingcooperating parties in fulfilling their contractual agreements.Collaboration among companies will be improved and the product time-to-market decreased due toautomation of certain process parts, more efficient exception handling and more transparentcooperation process. Cost reduction will also result from reduction of the amount of paper producedin the interaction between Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) and SMEs, bettercommunication and ability to move at a fast pace from product design to production phase anddelivery.2. Specifics of Aviation IndustryAirbus is one of the world’s two dominant civil aircraft producers with its more than 150 sitesthroughout the world and 16 development and manufacturing units spreading in France, Germany,Spain and the United Kingdom. Its share of the market grew steadily in 1980s [11]. In 2003 for thefirst time it gained the leaders position in the market. Today it is one of those industries where finalproducts or services result from cooperation of a huge number of enterprises. The industry can becharacterised by very complex and long life-cycle products (up to thirty-forty years), tightcooperation among companies of varying sizes leading to dependencies of different levels, nonplanableR&D cooperations , changing consensus/conflict constellations [9, 10] and many iterationsof the design and development processes. OEMs like Airbus are dependent upon performance andabilities of their strategic suppliers. A number of different cooperation directions like verticalcooperation between OEM and SMEs and horizontal between suppliers are to be considered whilemaking proposals for improvement of the current supplier network. All partnerships reflect thataeronautics is a dynamic global business in which the drive for competitive advantage seeks out thebest possible synergies, wherever they can be found. Collaboration is constrained bycompetitiveness rather than geography [11].Around 80% of the production and design of different parts of an aircraft is outsourced or executedin collaboration with other enterprises [4]. Therefore SMEs are important players in this industry.The complexity of the supplier networks underlines the fact that only in the region of Hamburgthere are approximately 500 supplier companies working directly or indirectly for Airbus [4]. Thegoal to stay competitive in the market pushes OEMs from aviation industry to redesign theirlogistics networks [5] and to integrate information systems from product engineering throughproduction to delivery. The integration of several information systems shall not only speed up thecommunication and cooperation process but also makes it transparent. Therefore the improvementsin ‘document and data exchange’ sector would have a positive impact for the whole suppliernetwork.3