Browsing by Author "Rojo Abollado, Jaime"

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    Challenges and benefits of digital workflow implementation in aerospace manufacturing engineering
    (Elsevier, 2017-05-09) Rojo Abollado, Jaime; Shehab, Essam; Bamforth, Philip
    Companies who operate in highly regulated industries have further challenges to the usual competition, continuous cost reduction and product development challenges. To address these requirements companies optimise their business processes and change their applications and information systems to support their evolving way of doing business. Workflow management technology eases the achievement of these necessities by providing methodologies, software and tools to support business process modelling, reengineering and workflow automation. Business process mapping is necessary in order to capture business processes as workflow specifications. Then, these systems allow business process reengineering, helping the optimisation of specified processes, and workflow automation, in order to generate a lean digital workflow from the specifications. There are many opportunities to benefit from this technology in aerospace applications, however these bring several implementation challenges in large global companies operating in multiple markets and need to be carefully managed. This research provides an overview of the benefits that digital workflows implementation can potentially bring to aerospace companies, together with a detailed description of significant challenges, regarding both the implementation of digital workflows and risks related to human factors. The study increases industry awareness on the importance of driving a digital transformation through implementing digital workflows, and where to start this implementation in a manufacturing business, highlighting the success factors.
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    Foundation for a consistent benchmark on workflow technologies for the aerospace manufacturing engineering industry
    (IOS, 2017-09-11) Rojo Abollado, Jaime; Shehab, Essam;
    Workflow management Systems (WfMSs) support the automation of all or parts of a company business processes. This technology is considered key by many businesses from a strategic point of view, and its market growth does not show any sign of receding. Business process digitisation is a crucial component of the digital transformation and the aerospace manufacturing engineering industry is lacking research efforts on the performance of different workflow management systems. In order to compare different workflow solutions, they need to be categorised based on some criteria. This research provides a classification of the different workflow technologies that exist in the market, with the respective advantages and disadvantages, together with a high level approach for a consistent digitisation of different workflows.
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    A Systems Approach for the Definition of Lean Workflows in Global Aerospace Manufacturing Companies
    (Elsevier, 2018-05-21) Rojo Abollado, Jaime; Shehab, Essam
    The aerospace and defense industry operates in an environment that has many regulatory requirements, driving additional challenges to the already required continuous improvement, global supply chain management and strong competition challenges. In order to deal with all that, these organisations attempt to update and develop new tools and management systems that can support the constantly changing way they do business. Most of them have recognised having too complex processes in order to adapt to that necessity, so they are making an effort to drive business process simplification and optimisation. Digital workflow tools and workflow management systems facilitate achieving business process optimization by partially automating them, but prior to that there is a need to carry out a process simplification and leaning exercise. Process digitisation is a key component of the digital transformation and therefore workflow technology is recognised by numerous industries as being a crucial part of their strategic development. However the aerospace manufacturing industry lacks research efforts on how to automate their workflows with a prior simplification exercise. This research’s aim is the development of a framework for workflows optimisation in global organisations. Therefore, this study focuses on describing this approach, which takes several elements from systems theory, applying several systems thinking principles and tools. It is a systems approach applied to workflow design. It emphases on explaining how to extract a set of lean workflows ready to be automated from an organisation’s current processes, activity that requires understanding the bigger picture.
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    Uncertainty assessment for measurement processes in the aerospace manufacturing industry
    (Elsevier, 2017-05-09) Rojo Abollado, Jaime; Shehab, Essam; Rose, M.; Schröter, T.
    Measurement processes are critical to the aerospace industry, which products must follow strict regulations and customer requirements. Additionally, measurement of uncertainty is fast becoming a requirement from both certification bodies and customers. An uncertainty assessment must be carried out for all processes that need to add an uncertainty statement to the measurement result. In order to maintain defined quality standards, aerospace manufacturing companies need to identify all measurement disciplines that benefit from stating the level of uncertainty and define a methodology to calculate it for complex measurement processes. An extensive research has been conducted in order to define the most appropriate methodology to assess uncertainty on complex aerospace components and a case study has been applied to assess the strain gauge calibration test uncertainty of different aerospace components. This study develops a generic framework, which helps the assessment of all individual sources of uncertainty and completes the one established by the Guide to the Expression of Uncertainty in Measurement. Conclusions have been extracted from the outcome of the case study. The conducted research contributes to a better understanding of measurement processes and good practices that lead to lower uncertainty. The outcome will help manufacturing companies to be aware of the contributors of uncertainty to the tests, how to reduce this uncertainty and the reliability of the measurements taken during the process.