Airbus's IoT partnership eliminates foreign object debris and reduces asset loss by 80%

Airbus says it has wiped out foreign object debris incidents on its production floor and cut lost assets by 80% across more than 100 sites after a decade-long partnership with IoT specialist Sensolus.

The aerospace group’s experience underlines how difficult physical asset control can be inside a sprawling manufacturing network. Airbus moves tens of thousands of containers, tools and other items between suppliers, logistics hubs and assembly lines across Europe, yet in 2016 m...

uch of that equipment was still effectively invisible once it left a warehouse. Planning systems could record transactions, but they could not show where the assets actually were.

According to the companies, the first phase of the project concentrated on returnable transport containers. Sensolus fitted NB-IoT trackers to the assets and linked location data into Airbus’s existing systems through standard APIs. A patented recovery algorithm was then used to keep track of containers as they moved by truck, rail and ocean freight, even when connectivity dropped during handovers between transport modes.

Airbus says the result was a sharp fall in misplaced assets, less unnecessary replacement buying and a reduction in work-in-progress inventory. Sensolus has also said the solution delivered complete visibility of returnable transport packaging and improved monitoring of suppliers across Airbus’s wider industrial footprint.

A second deployment targeted a more sensitive problem: foreign object debris, or FOD, on the production floor. In aircraft assembly, a misplaced tool or part can create safety risks and expensive delays. Using Bluetooth Low Energy technology, Sensolus created digital twins of tools so that missing items could be found quickly and usage and maintenance histories could be traced more reliably.

Maxime Saraiva, Airbus’s IoT technical specialist, said: “On top of being accurate, quick to deploy, and energy-efficient, [our solution] works extremely well. The flow of logistics data has increased significantly, providing greater visibility for daily operations.”

The company says the FOD problem was eliminated across the deployment and that the investment paid back within six months.

The Airbus case is being held up as a broader lesson for the aerospace sector, where returnable packaging, ground equipment and specialist tools are often scattered across multiple tiers of the supply chain. With commercial aircraft demand still creating pressure across the industry, manufacturers and suppliers are under growing strain to avoid delays that stem not from production capacity, but from poor visibility of the physical assets that keep the line moving.

Source: Noah Wire Services