Case Study - SNC

Owned by Chairwoman and President Eren Ozmen and CEO Fatih Ozmen, SNC is a trusted leader in solving the world’s toughest challenges through best-of-breed, open architecture engineering in Space Systems, Commercial Solutions, and National Security and Defense. SNC is recognized among The Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Space and was selected as a US Best Managed Company for two consecutive years. For nearly 60 years, SNC has delivered state-of-the-art civil, military and commercial solutions including more than 4,000 space systems, subsystems and components to customers worldwide, and participated in more than 500 missions to space, including to Mars. In spring 2021, SNC announced the transition of its Space Systems business area to an independent commercial space company, Sierra Space.

nearly 4,000 team members
40+ locations
50+ years

Project Description:

SNC and Andea have worked together to create a “Manufacturing Planning and Execution Platform” solution using DELMIA Apriso, which will enable SNC to design, fabricate, retrofit, and maintain its broad range of products.

This is the first step of many, with the plan to use several of Dassault Systèmes applications, including ORTEMS Scheduling, Digital Manufacturing, and Enovia PLM.

SNC and Andea held a one-week kick-off where, as a combined team, they created the following milestones and core ideals:

01

Start the project quickly, and get both of SNC and Andea’s team members using an agile development method, which concentrates on a “skateboard” approach. This methodology would not create a large “Cadillac” solution upfront, but rather release software as early as possible to meet the users’ needs. This allowed key stakeholders to get their hands on the solution as early as possible and provide essential feedback, while eliminating the need for a “big-bang” go-live.

Create a shared vision that provides a solution that works for all SNC areas, but also sets a clear goal for the entire project team to work and deliver against.

02

03

Adopt a “quality first” approach so that everything developed within the sprint includes functional tests and is “ready to be deployed.” This creates trust in the solution early on, provides flexibility in deployment, and significantly reduces the cost of change and maintenance.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the team modified the original project plan to allow all project activities, including go-live, to be performed remotely with minimal risk.

04

The project’s biggest intangible goal was to establish a trusted partnership as early as possible between SNC and Andea, and to create a solution that “moves the needle” for the end-users.

Project Highlights:

Create a Unified System for Multiple Business Areas
SNC's business operations cover multiple business areas that are vastly different, with their scope of work ranging from aircraft integrations and electronic assembly to producing products that fly to space (and back). SNC needed a universal production solution that would replace over 20 applications used currently by their various plants and business divisions. This unified system's main objective is to support the company’s different processes and address their diverse business needs in the fields of production, quality, warehouse, labor, and supply chain.
1
100% Remote Project Development and Delivery
The project kicked off amid a strict worldwide lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced a reframing of all regular project activities usually done on-site. Due to a joint effort, the teams were able to execute all project milestones and required action items remotely. SNC and Andea had open round-the-clock online workrooms for team members to meet and discuss challenges, solve issues, and deliberate on possible solutions. Having multiple development teams was beneficial as it enabled problems to be addressed over “two shifts” and simplified go-live support.
2
Code-Sharing Agreement: Hexcel, CoorsTek, and SNC - Going Live in Under Six Months
SNC, Hexcel and CoorsTek created a “solution-share” agreement in which each company agreed to share their various Apriso solutions. This allowed the receiving company to get “battle-tested” functionality significantly faster, cheaper, and with higher quality than doing it standalone. SNC helped drive this agreement with Andea, and used it as a baseline to speed up development by over nine months and go live with the first version in under six months. Andea is excited to see how this can benefit all parties. Initial workings show this Code-sharing Agreement being over 70% less costly than traditional DELMIA Apriso Project Implementations.
3
Project Methodology – 100% Agile
The project ran end-to-end in two-week iterations called sprints, which started immediately after a weeklong remote workshop and two weeks of design. Team members held daily stand-up meetings to exchange vital information about the project's crucial milestones, and gather critical and timely feedback. These regular updates, supported by weekly backlog meetings, allowed for the requirements, priorities, processes, and procedures to change in near real-time. It also made it possible to maintain a shared vision and to keep momentum throughout the entire project. Andea acknowledges this would not have been possible without SNC's trust.
4

The Apriso platform has given us the ability to revolutionize and standardize our manufacturing practices across a diverse product portfolio. Andea has not only brought to the table deep knowledge of the DELMIA solutions, but strong expertise in good manufacturing practices that we have been able to apply in our organization.

Jason Priebe, Vice President of Corporate Operations at Sierra Nevada Corporation

SNC’s business partnership with Andea has allowed them to leverage the know-how that the Andea team brings to the table due to their DELMIA Apriso and “real-world” experience. Andea prides itself on having one of the world’s most skillful teams of MES consultants, with some members having over two decades of experience. Andea as a company has supported over 440 different MES implementations across in multiple industries, including numerous in the aerospace and defense domain. This experience allowed for SNC and Andea to tackle difficult business problems together so that the created solution could genuinely help the users and the business as a whole.

Another way Andea and SNC worked together to meet goals was by creating a powerful and intuitive web-based planning and execution solution. This allowed engineers to develop and approve process plans that provided complete control of how the parts are produced with rich multi-media work instructions, data collection, and configurable role-based buy-offs. Simultaneously, these features were used in an easy-to-use operator portal, which displayed work instructions and records by who did what, and captured critical traceability. Developing and rolling out the planning and execution modules together allowed for them to be streamlined and cleanly expanded. This reduced both the development times and made the solution significantly less complicated for the end-users than traditional out-of-the-box solutions.

Project Highlights:

SNC has a well thought-out, multi-year roadmap for the digital transformation of their entire business, which Andea is honored to be part of. While this journey is far from over, Andea would like to thank the entire SNC team for their support, trust, transparency, initiative, and passion in creating a next-generation solution.