Cyient: Driving Innovation and Growth in the A&D Lifecycle

“Achieving meaningful growth through innovation within the Aerospace and Defense (A&D) industry requires rethinking the standard approach to innovation,” begins Anand Parameswaran, SVP of Aerospace and Defense BU at Cyient. To substantiate this statement, he exemplifies the scenario of a leading supplier of cabin modules, crew rest compartments, and air ducts, who was facing challenges in delivering the final products on time and within budget. Their workflow required a tremendous amount of meticulous and time-consuming resource planning. Moreover, operating in a cyclical industry, the company could not afford to increase their capacity as per their peak load and were looking for external assistance to ramp up their engineering capacity. With over two decades of global experience and industry knowledge in the A&D sector, India-based Cyient was their prime choice to remediate this problem. Cyient’s non-traditional approaches helped the company adhere to their schedules while delivering high-quality products. Cyient also propelled the A&D giant to embrace the latest technologies and sustain their competitive advantage in the marketplace. Even today, Cyient continues to maintain a strong relationship with the company, helping them achieve flexibility in capacity, optimize resources, and streamline processes to yield better outcomes.

“Today’s A&D industry is standing at an inflection point,” says Parameswaran. “Digital transformation is revolutionizing the aviation landscape—changing its ecosystem to one that is marked by growing speed, agility, and integration.” In the wake of this transformation, achieving growth through innovation involves numerous risks at every point of the aerospace lifecycle. Cyient is uniquely positioned to share those risks with A&D companies while addressing their digital opportunities. “We offer a nexus of new digital capabilities to solve traditional A&D problems,” says Parameswaran.

This includes solutions like AR/VR for training and repair, digitization of technical publications, use of IoT solutions for connected factories, and data analytics for image processing and dissemination in real-time.

At its core, Cyient is committed to solving the three core challenges that persist in the A&D industry: services, systems, and solutions. Driven by this mission, the company offers a wide range of solutions that give aerospace OEMs an extra edge in the marketplace. What differentiates Cyient from others in the industry is its ability to provide a comprehensive ‘design-build-maintain’ solution, helping OEMs focus on only one supplier for all their aerospace lifecycle management needs.“Providing Design-Build-Maintain solutions for today’s agile businesses” is the motto that steers Cyient.

“As a premier supplier of aerospace solutions, we have earned recognition for both our innovation and productivity,” says Parameswaran. Utilizing the power of advanced analytics, Cyient’s validation system has not only eliminated most of the human effort in manually testing and processing maintenance records, but also brought significant improvements in speed, volume, and quality compared to the traditional, manual processes. “Overall, the validation time has reduced by 80 percent and the number of records validated per hour has increased 300 times,” informs Parameswaran.

That said, Parameswaran notes that 2017 was a pivotal year for Cyient. The company launched their in-house investment vehicle—New Business Accelerator (NBA)—to drive investments in unmet market needs and address critical challenges in the A&D industry by developing innovative solutions. One of the recent solutions of the NBA program is an X-Band transmit and receive module for active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar systems. The module uses enhanced hybrid technology and commercial off-the-shelf components to increase assembly line efficiency, leading to high volume and lower costs.

Moving forward, Cyient is willful to augment its presence in the defense sector. “Defense spending has risen among all the nations, and this is the perfect time for us to strengthen our footing in that domain,” says Parameswaran. Presently, focusing on India, Israel, and the U.S., Cyient is poised to bring momentous change to the defense industry in the coming years.