There is very, very little room for error in aerospace and defense (A&D) manufacturing. For companies that build products like missiles, rocket boosters and avionics, each part must not deviate more than a hairsbreadth from its technical specifications.
Despite the precise demands of the industry, however, parts ordering is generally done using systems that are only slightly better than carrier pigeon: generally some combination of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, long text PDFs attached to email, or an A&D company’s internal portal. Communication between companies and suppliers about these highly technical parts can also be bogged down by similarly low-tech, human-driven errors, like forgetting to copy someone on an email.
“I had this crazy theory that nothing can really move forward in terms of automation until all of that text, all of those decisions, get digitized,” Malory McLemore said in a recent interview with TechCrunch.
To solve this problem, Mc...
