Revolutionizing supply chains

(peaceful instrumental music) - [Host] Welcome to ONE Aviation, a maker of very light jets. In a highly competitive world of aviation, it's not enough to just make an innovative product. You have to make that product better, faster, and more efficiently than your competitors. That means leaving nothing to chance. Long before the pre-flight checklist and physical evaluations, before test flights and production runs, ONE Aviation had 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. Good morning. - Good morning. - What's going on? - Well, today we're preparing to go fly. - [Host] 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. - No, we're excited. - Not one bit. - How do you know? Like, how do you know that this is going to work? - Almost every piece in this airplane has a digital representation or maybe what you'd refer to as a digital twin. 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 fly it - Absolutely. - 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. - [Host] 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 gives 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, D.C. 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'll start with you Kelly 'cause you've really sponsored and spearheaded this effort since the beginning. - I think what has sparked the interest is there's such a need, particularly in the Department of 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 an individual piece of equipment, it's about the connection of those and almost every meeting I was in, our clients, and people that we were talking with were asking about this, were really engaged in the 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 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 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. 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, in some cases years to zero. - There's that 10, 20, 30 percent productivity bump in front of us if we can get this notion of digital thread right because what we're going to learn. - I think so, you take time and latency out of the supply chain. - Yeah, it's no longer linear, this is, 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. - So can the digital thread really help companies win? Well, that's what I'm going to find out. (synth music)