Manufacturing excellence in aerospace

The AMRC is a joint initiative from Britain's University of Sheffield and global aircraft manufacturer Boeing with a mission to create a Centre of Manufacturing Excellence.

The AMRC is a joint initiative from Britain's University of Sheffield and global aircraft manufacturer Boeing with a mission to create a Centre of Manufacturing Excellence.

ATS International will be a member of the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC).

The focus of the AMRC has expanded from studying design, engineering and tooling techniques to investigating ways to improve manufacturing and business processes.

ATS' role as a member of the AMRC will be to share knowledge and ideas on how to apply Manufacturing Intelligence Software (MI) and Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES).

ATS' key area of competence is machine data acquisition and analysis, providing information for research engineers to draw conclusions.

With MES ATS bridges the gap between production facilities and the boardroom.

Main focus is presenting operators, managers and executives with real-time structured production data, enabling them to make decisions based on facts.

For the last 2 years, Mike James, Group Managing Director of ATS, has been leading an ATS team involved in a Shop Floor IT project to design, implement and support systems at Rolls-Royce Aerospace factories.

Mr James has been leading this initiative to investigate ways to improve manufacturing processes and strengthen the enterprise's Business Improvement, Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma (quality methods for manufacturers to become "best in class", with minimal defects per million units or operations).

The University's Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC) and Boeing have engauged in a multimillion partnership including Rolls-Royce, intended to build on the shared scientific excellence, expertise and technological innovation of the world's leading aerospace companies and the world-class research centre at the University of Sheffield's Faculty of Engineering.

The AMRC's Vision is to become a world-class global research facility developing innovative and advanced technology solutions for advanced materials forming.

Building upon Sheffield's historic and indigenous expertise in metal development and processing, the University, Boeing and the AMRC are also keen to now build upon their internationally acknowledged research into other materials such as composites.

Novel and new materials will form an integral part within the development of Boeing's new generation planes.

Mike James, Group Managing Director of ATS about this decision: "We see sharing knowledge as a crucial element in world-class manufacturing.

The research completed at the AMRC will be shared with the partners and will stimulate engineers, developers, managers and executives to 'think out of the box' to dramatically reduce manufacturing costs and improve quality.

Professor Keith Ridgway, Research Director leading the AMRC commented that the next step at the AMRC "is to build a complete "aerospace factory" to test new research techniques in a real world environment and introduce advanced, efficient and effective manufacturing processes.

Chris Biddle, Head of Shop Floor Systems at Rolls-Royce, initiated the membership application of ATS, "We felt that the researchers at the AMRC would benefit from working with a specialist Shop Floor IT partner to automate data acquisition and analysis, accelerating research and assisting our machine suppliers to deliver IT enabled equipment.

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