New Manufacturing Takes Flight

Abstract

Pratt & Whitney’s Industry 4.0 initiative marks a major transformation from the labor-intensive manual processes that once defined manufacturing to those that are now digitized and automated. The changes here helped P&W improve key metrics—production volume, quality assurance, labor reduction, cycle time, to name a few—by up to 65 percent. This article takes a closer look at how companies not only have to update the types of machines and systems they use to remain competitive, but they also have to change the way they recruit, hire, and train the engineers and technicians who work on them.