News from the Safran community

Launched on June 2, 2022 under the impetus of Safran CEO Olivier Andriès, the Digital Academy is tasked with enabling the upskilling of all employees as part of our digital transformation. Innovative, collaborative and fun, the platform offers customized and progressive programs to develop employee skills in the Group’s five digital transformation streams: Engineering 4.0, Manufacturing 4.0, Customer, Sales, Support and Services 4.0, Employee Experience 4.0 and Data 4.0. The Digital Academy also proposes content on international digital news and trends. Programs are available as either distance learning 24/7 on the platform (e-learning/videos, podcasts, interviews, articles, serious games, etc.), or in-person at the Safran Campus.

Level up your digital skills now!

On May 19, 2022, Maxime Capon, Le Creusot Facility Manager, and Claude Quillien, EVP Production at Safran Aircraft Engines, received the Grand Prize in the 2022 Factory Awards, organized by trade magazine Usine Nouvelle.

The award was given for the plant’s autonomous machining 4.0 project that came onstream in early 2022. It combines the deployment of autonomous machines in a Factory 4.0 approach with improved working conditions thanks to the elimination of night shifts in this part of the plant. It was a winning combination to improve the performance of the plant, which machines turbine disks for CFM56 and LEAP engines.

Dubbed ‘Project Horizon 2022”, it involved a 4,000 square meter extension with space for 12 autonomous machine tools, plus closed-door machining, pallet loading robots, etc.

EtQ stands for Excellence through Quality. It’s a multifunction digital application designed to manage audits, non-compliance, employee certifications and problem-solving. EtQ is the cornerstone of a quality management system. Part of the Manufacturing 4.0 digital transformation plan, EtQ provides dashboards that track standard performance indicators in just a few clicks. This unified, harmonized solution is easy to use and spans all Safran companies. Plus, it’s continuously upgraded to meet new requirements. Data is clearer, more accessible and organized. The user interface was recently enhanced with powerful digital-enabled features, allowing EtQ to contribute to continuous quality improvement. It will shortly feed into the digital solutions applied at our plants, such as the Manufacturing Execution System (MES), to enhance our digital continuity.

The Digital and IT department (DDSI) launched the SHIFT project across Safran a year ago to deploy a digital workplace using Microsoft 365. Since then, 50,000 licenses have been allocated. A key aspect of this project are the 1,200 “SHIFTers” who have delivered over 22,000 training sessions worldwide. Each week, we log, on average, more than one million Teams chats, 100,000 video-conference participations and 50,000 Yammer activities! Thomas Vincent, SHIFT project manager, says: “To further strengthen implementation, we’re starting SHIFT Boost webinars on Thursdays for people who have yet to take the training, along with those who want to learn about advanced functions like OneNote, Planner, etc.”

SHIFT will be adding new functions as we move forward. For instance, you can manage document confidentiality using Microsoft Information Protection, or co-edit an Excel document during a Teams meeting, using Excel Live. “Our teams are hard at work to enrich Microsoft 365 functions so that we can make our communications and collaboration even better,” concludes Thomas Vincent.

How does digitalization improve the overall efficiency of production? That’s one of the main challenges in the digital transformation plan now being rolled out at the Safran Aircraft Engines and Safran Landing Systems sites in Suzhou, China. Starting in 2019, they’ve developed a data digitalization project concerning more than 100 machines, with support from Safran China IT Services. Machine condition and cycle times are now recorded, allowing more accurate and effective analysis and tracking of operational efficiency. “Thanks to this data, our production team improved efficiency by displaying a seismogram of operations and applying real-time priority management,” notes Mathieu Prioul, Managing Director of Safran Aircraft Engines Suzhou. “We’re also using data to identify continuous improvement actions to enhance the overall efficiency of our operations.”