John Anthony: Elevate Aircraft Seating: Standardizing DFM & Reducing Design Review Friction

John Anthony:

I’m going to be talking today about standardizing the DFM process. I try to bring suppliers in. I try to bring material suppliers in. I try to bring engineers and quality engineers way up front in a program, supply chain, everybody. I’m kind of that go-to person who brings everybody together and tries to move things forward upstream. One thing that I’ve been doing is trying to bring aPriori in with our team so that it’s also part of that DFM process upfront on a program. But I haven’t gone to the level that I was really thinking about today. I need to bring aPriori in even further upfront in a program, just like I bring in a supplier or a material supplier, to really move it forward. We’re using aPriori, to be quite honest. We’re trying to be a little bit proactive, but we’re still kind of in the reactive phase.

My name is John Anthony. I’m a Lead Design Engineer with Elevate Aircraft Seating out of Huntington Beach, California. We’re a Boeing-owned company. Elevate Aircraft Seating was founded in 2018. Elevate Aircraft Seating provides business-class seats to some of the world’s leading airlines, and we’re committed to delivering high-quality products with a focus on craftsmanship, innovation, and passenger comfort. Everything you see there in the picture we make and develop, except the seats are done overseas, but we do all the components. In these airline first-class seats, thousands of parts are used. So there are a lot of different parts that we use. It’s not incredibly high volume, for those of you who are in aerospace. We’re a subsidiary of the Boeing Company. We’ve grown very quickly and purposefully since the foundation in 2018. Backed by the strength of Boeing, we’ve accomplished a remarkable amount in a short amount of time. We are beyond a startup company, but we still have that feeling of a startup company. Things are still moving very rapidly right now. We’ve gotten to the point where we have so much work now that we’re taking our precious customers and sending some of them someplace else and picking the very few that we want, unfortunately. Maybe that’s a good thing, maybe a bad thing, but we are definitely growing very fast.

What we want to do is continue to dive deeper into aPriori. We have between 30 and 90 engineers, depending on the time of the year. We have permanent and different employees that work on many of these first-class products. We have three design engineers, and I’m one of them. My background is in plastics engineering, so I’m an expert in injection molding. I’ve been doing this since I was 18 years old. I’m 56 now. I can usually run circles around people when it comes to injection molding. I just love injection molding. I always have. I’m very, very good at that. But I’m not an expert in sheet metal. I’m not an expert in machining or different things like that, or assembling. That’s where aPriori has really helped me because I would like to be an expert in those areas. I leverage aPriori to help me because I have people coming to me all the time to talk about sheet metal. I don’t want to talk about sheet metal. I want to talk about what’s easy. But I can be an expert in sheet metal through aPriori. We put it in the design, we go into aPriori Design, and you can understand what’s going on. You can understand what the bend radius should be. I don’t have a clue unless I get in there and see what it should be. Many of you are saying, “Well, I’m an expert in sheet metal,” and that’s awesome. That’s not me. I also focus on pressure forming and vacuum forming. There are three of us, so there’s a lot that we have to do. There’s a tremendous amount of parts coming through our facility.

One of the reasons that we purchased aPriori is to remove product and manufacturing costs. Our product costs were too high, and so we wanted to bring down the cost. We’re using aPriori to do that. That’s been very helpful, and I’m going to show a few examples here in a little bit. It’s also to help with quality concerns. There are a lot of quality concerns. We have so many parts coming through, there’s no way everybody can be an expert and catch everything. aPriori has really helped us catch these things that are coming through and any quality issues. Then, of course, DFM clarity and success. Especially within the last three months or so, we have been checking 100 percent of our parts in aPriori.

And how important is DFM, design for manufacturing? Anybody can design a part. Even if you’re not a designer, you can figure it out and design a part. Do we have any senior-level engineers here today who would call yourselves senior-level engineers? Okay, awesome. That’s great. These guys are the ones who have been through the wringer. You’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. You’re the one who helps lead others and gets them where they need to be. Everybody can design a part, but not everybody can see whether it’s manufacturable or not. That’s where aPriori helps not only the senior-level guys, because we understand what the inputs are, or rather the outputs, coming from aPriori. But we can also help train the design engineers who are coming along. I’ve trained hundreds of engineers over the years. Now we’re getting to the point where things are starting to flip and design engineers have another go-to besides me, which is kind of cool. We have so many parts coming down the pipe, there’s no possible way that three of us out of sometimes 90 engineers can keep up. So it’s been a great thing.

Another reason we use it is to improve designer flow. We have a certain flow that we’re using for our DFMs and how it processes through our system, and I’m getting to that a little bit today. Then it’s to take engineering to the next level in intelligent AI. I think we all want to do that today. The other thing is to educate our design engineers. I’ve been over and over with design engineers about how to design things and how to develop things, and it’s like a never-ending process. Now we have a tool. Now we have a calculator. I had a class in college where I had to take 300-level chemistry and calculus and all this stuff, and I had this one teacher who wouldn’t let us use calculators. It was terrible. But now we have a more advanced AI calculator, if you will, that our guys can use to get educated on what needs to happen. I love aPriori because they have this great little tool. If you run over the part, if there’s an issue in aPriori Design, it’ll tell you what to do and what the next step is. This is great for our designers to get in there and understand how to design and develop a part. I would prefer that they come to me with questions instead of me going to them.

What was important for Elevate, and why? It had to be a 3D model-based analysis. Our design engineers can take a STEP file or a CATIA file, and they can just throw it into aPriori and it can spit out results. It’s really that easy. Speed and ease of use. Same thing. You can instantly get design-for-manufacturing feedback. I believe that aPriori is a senior-level machine, a senior-level calculator. Why wouldn’t we use aPriori? That’s awesome. Use aPriori to understand what’s going on. Have your design engineers use aPriori to understand what’s happening at that level. It’s a great thing. It’s a great teaching tool, and it’s a great way to get ahead. It was also important that we could do an in-depth analysis of all our processes. We have a lot of different processes, everything from composites to injection molding to different components. So that was really important, that it could take care of all our processes.

One of the big things for me is that I need to make sure, as a senior-level engineer, that the part is manufacturable. You have to know the part is manufacturable, ideally before you get a quote on that part. We’ve all been through things. We’ve had successes and failures as engineers over our lives. Especially senior engineers, they really get it. You’ll be on top of people’s shoulders and they’ll be shouting your name, saying, “Look at this guy. He’s doing so great.” Then the next minute, you’ll be the dirt under their feet if you do something wrong. So I have to make sure that I’m accurate in the information that I’m feeding and the parts that I’m designing. That is my responsibility as a senior engineer. The great thing, like I was saying, is that aPriori is like a senior engineer. I can get good feedback. We’ve had great feedback from aPriori on the DFMs. It’s just a really good source for making sure that we close off all issues before the parts even go to the supplier. It’s a beautiful thing.

Another thing that was important for us is collaboration between the leads and the design engineers. We can go back and forth and have a key connection. I might say, “Okay, we don’t have time. Let’s talk about this next week.” And the design engineer can say, “Well, I have information right now. I have data right now. aPriori is showing this.” I’m like, “Well, go with it. Fix it.” Be the loop. If you understand what is wrong, you don’t need me to say, “Fix it.” If aPriori is saying, “Fix it,” then fix it. You be the feedback loop to yourself. That’s what we’re trying to train our engineers to do. When it comes to me, I can oversee everything that’s happening, make sure everything’s cool, and make sure everything’s clear. There are some things that aPriori will spit out where we’ll say, “Okay, they’re saying this might be an issue, but not so much here because we’re going to do it this way.” Or maybe there’s a secondary operation that’s going to solve for that issue. But aPriori has been a great resource for us.

It’s also wonderful to have process education for our engineers. That educational piece is important. Like I’m saying, I’m learning sheet metal. I’m 56 years old. I should’ve learned a long time ago, but I’m learning now. There are a lot of people who are learning plastics now, which is a great thing. Education, I believe, is a key point and a key part of this. aPriori AI is actually making us smarter as people as we go forward. It’s not just a dumb calculator where we push a button and it gives us some feedback. We’re actually learning in that process. We’re not doing less. We’re actually understanding more. We’re understanding the why behind the what. I love that aPriori gets very deep, and we’re going to go over that in a little bit here.

Our workflow is basically that all our design engineers are now required, 100 percent, to submit their designs through an aPriori web app. They currently do not have aPriori Design. That’s something that we would like to bring into their world shortly. But they do submit to the aPriori web app, and they do get feedback on it through an email if things are good or things are bad. Then they can change whatever they need to at that point. This solution is something aPriori came up with to support Elevate Aircraft Seating and our need to make it as easy as possible for designers to receive feedback. It was a first step in leveraging aPriori’s automation, enabling designers to submit requests via this web app and send notifications through email.

They basically fill it out. aPriori came up with the solution. By the way, I’ve been hearing one thing repeatedly: Collaboration with aPriori is absolutely excellent. We meet with these guys once or twice a week. When they made this for us, we met with them. The first line, even something as simple as the program part number and part name, wasn’t something we had initially. I said, “Look, we need a program because I need to search by program to see how many parts have issues and see what the critical issues are across so many parts.” So they came up with this little solution, and now I have the ability to search.

They also came up with these digital factories that were created in collaboration between Elevate and aPriori. These are amazingly accurate and interesting. This particular one uses California. Your digital factory in California is going to be different from your digital factory in China, for instance. Then here you select a process group for how your part is made. Super simple. This is a web app. This is on the web, like on the website. This is what you see, and you just fill it in. This is what all of our design engineers do. Here you select the process group for how your part is made. In this case, it’s sheet metal. Then you select a material. aPriori has, surprisingly, a huge catalog of materials to use. However, being in aerospace, they didn’t have the high-temperature materials that we require or some of the strength levels that we needed. But their team was able to develop this catalog for us for some high-temperature materials that we require. They were able to put it into this dropdown list. That was through collaboration as well.

After our designers submit to this aPriori web app, the design engineer receives a PDF with DFM scores and costs. Just a simple solution. Is it a critical issue or isn’t it? Is it a green light or a red light? That’s all we need to know. Is it good, or do you have to keep designing the thing? They not only receive the email, but they also receive a PDF with those scores. This solution is part of aPriori’s aP Generate product that sends an automated email, giving the ability to dive in further on items that need attention. If I have to get in there and see what’s going on a little bit deeper, I can do that. I can bring up aPriori Design, get in there, and check the specifics of the product. The design engineer also receives a PDF summary report in each email. They can send that PDF to us. We can look into it and dive a little bit deeper. Then after the email, the lead designers review the DFM parts in aPriori Design, and then review them with the design engineers in aPriori Design as required.

Then we can get a little bit more in depth and begin to analyze the aPriori DFM results. Here’s a plastic part that was submitted through a web app, and it magically appeared in aPriori Design. Kind of cool. We found on this part that I’d purposely designed some defects into this injection-molded part. This is not a part that we actually have. It’s a fictitious part that we made up. Where you’re seeing red here, these ribs have zero-degree draft. So it absolutely will not work for an injection-molded part. It will not come out of the press. If you design this part and send it to be quoted, it gets quoted, they make the tool, and it’s going to be a $50,000 boat anchor if you don’t do it right the first time. You learn some things over time. You either do things right the first time, or you do things right the second time. That’s a great use of aPriori, helping us stay on track and stay in tune with what needs to happen to do things right the first time.

This is also a nice little educational tool, down there in the red on the bottom right, to help us understand the why behind the what. We can get clearer feedback on issues to communicate back to the design engineers, or if they have access to aPriori, they can get in there and understand what needs to happen as well. Here we see a material tab. This tells us a little bit more about the material. We don’t have a lot of this filled in, but you could fill in the rest of the material information. We don’t need all the information that’s on here. If we did, I’m sure that aPriori would be happy to collaborate with us and put that information in.

Then we can dive deeper into the cost results and go back and redesign it as needed to improve the cost. The thing that’s great about aPriori, if you haven’t used it, is that you can create these iterations. You can create it once like this, another time like this, and another time like that. Then you can put it together and analyze the three different, four different, or 20 different results that you have as a design engineer. You can come to me and say, “Hey, John, we did it 20 times and I got a better cost result. I got a better quality part.” You can look really good just by going through that feedback loop with aPriori. Super important. Maybe you want to make a thinner part to make it more cost-optimized and see what that would do. But you make it a thinner part and it doesn’t work because it’s injection molded and you can’t push the material through that part because you’re using high-temperature aerospace material. Whatever it may be. Then you have to back out of it and say, “Okay, well, I can’t do that.” That’s good information too. Great information.

We can run and analyze other scenarios and other iterations. In this example, I changed a couple of things. I changed the material a couple of different times. Then I ran it in China to see what the difference was. We can see that the China pricing on this particular part was lower, of course, for the part cost, but also for the tool cost. So your capital investment is less. Then I can see these side by side. The last gentleman just reviewed this as well. In the first example, it’s a polycarbonate material that’s glass-filled. That’s how it started. Then it went to an ABS material, which is not typically an aerospace material, just FYI. But you can see that the cost of the part dropped. Then I ran it again, and you can see in China at the ABS level that not only did the cost and price of that individual part go down, but also the tool cost. You can compare scenarios. Great tool. We can compare pricing, make changes, and make our company money. Isn’t that what we’re here for? To drive down cost, drive down time, and make life better. That’s not going to stop as an engineer. It’s a circular loop, so we might as well get used to it.

The summary of the workflow with aPriori is that the design engineer submits that request through aP Generate through the web app, in our case. You may do it differently, but this is what we do. Then the design engineer looks at the report in the email, and they can go back in and continue to change the part based on the results that they received. Or they can continue on to design another part. This is called aP Analytics and aP Generate. Then the lead designer typically gets involved. We’re going to open this up very soon to more and more people. We do have some design engineers who have the ability to go into aPriori Design, but we’re going to open that up more and more to different designers.

Then there’s the collaboration. This is one that I’m just learning, and I love the collaboration here. Many of you have worked in here and probably seen this. You get to put some information on the part, and the design engineer can put some issues and some things that they fixed, or whatever it is. It can be sent to me, and I can send it back to the design engineer. We can go back and forth until we have a great design part. We can even communicate with supply chain.

Then I made this slide. Sorry, I had to cut out all the numbers. I realized I can’t share these numbers. But supply chain isn’t always knowledgeable about the parts and the costing. They can get good information from aPriori. Elevate’s supply chain uses aPriori for negotiation power, of course. I’ve heard that a lot during this event. I think aPriori is positioned nicely to go even further in the future with its specific connections to AI. AI requires a system that can evolve, and aPriori seems to be a good manufacturing framework for that system.

aPriori is a good team to work with and answer questions. We’re currently working with aPriori to develop pressure forming and vacuum forming, something that we found they didn’t have. But we’re developing that with them because that’s an important plastics process and important for the parts that we use at our facility. If you’re a vacuum former, they’ll have that soon, probably thanks to us a little bit.

In summary, how has it helped us? DFM checks and development have been huge. Reduced design reviews and engineering collaboration. Supply chain cost savings through negotiating power. Process education for design engineers. And aPriori has given us an AI expertise edge. I’d love to see us continue that and dive deeper. I’m an expert, again, in plastics, but not in sheet metal. We can’t all be experts, but we can leverage aPriori to get better every day. Thank you so much for having me today.