Aerospace, Defense Industry Must Join Digital Revolution

According to the Government Accountability Office report, "Acquisition Reform: DoD Should Streamline Its Decision-Making Process for Weapon Systems to Reduce Inefficiencies" (GAO-15-192), acquisition programs spend, on average, "over two years completing numerous information requirements at each milestone decision, yet acquisition officials considered only about half of the requirements as high value." Average time to prepare and review major acquisition documents - such as the capability development document, the systems engineering plan and the test and evaluation master plan - is measured in years. [...]these documents are not linked dynamically to changing requirements. Likely benefits from using digital engineering approaches include: enhanced communication among developers and stakeholders using a single, configured, quantified source of truth; reduced development risk due to continuous evaluation of requirements and design verification; improved system quality due to rigorous requirements traceability and test-ability; streamlined manufacturing processes with better supply chain management and less scrap and rework; increased productivity due to the ability to quickly evaluate the impact of changing requirements; and streamlined operations and sustainment through use of all available knowledge to optimize maintainability and extend service life of the system. The key attributes of the ecosystem are supportive of government engineering capabilities that provide independent insight to government decision makers without compromising proprietary rights of industry; enable decision makers to leverage model-based systems engineering and model-based engineering to conduct mission and system analysis over the lifecycle; avoid the imposition of any specific digital engineering technologies or tools on contractors; evolve in a collaborative manner while maintaining healthy competition; and provide the ability to perform syntheses and analyses and share digital artifacts and information across diverse domains, disciplines, systems, organizations and lifecycle phases.