Support to standards management for the CTO Office

The technical standards are the most important tool in aerospace to establish the technical specifications and general guidelines of any product, service or process. They are references which facilitate the technological development and optimize the quality and the safety of this sector. The standardization activities are carried out by companies or other entities to develop the technical standards which are eventually shared in the industrial context. Airbus is continuously involved in these activities with other companies and the Standards Developing Organizations (SDOs). The SDOs are organizations that promote the development of the standards and organize activities for this scope (for example Working Groups and Enquiries). The department of the Chief Technology Officer at Airbus has put in place a team for the management of the standardization activities across the Business Units (Airbus Commercial Aircraft, Airbus Helicopters and Airbus Defense & Space). One of the main challenges of the department is the harmonization of the different strategies and working attitudes. The main objective of this project is to create a stronger connection between the standardization management and the expert community which would allow to actively involve the experts in the standardization activities. The first step is to define the Technical Domains for standardization. It allows to map and crosscheck the standardization needs with Airbus organization (engineering, expert community, management), the technological subjects and the fields of expertise (called Centers of Competency). The establishment of the Technical Domains leads to the creation of a new process to manage the standardization activities using the information provided by the SDOs as input of this process (e.g. SDO Technical Committee). In order to coordinate the standardization activities, a tool is implemented on Excel in a preliminary version: the program allows the standardization management to find the right experts or specialized groups according to an external input (e.g. proposal of a new work by a SDO). Moreover, the efficiency of the activities needs to be increased. In particular, the process of the Enquiries - standards drafts sent by the SDOs to get Airbus comments - is low performing because only few responses are provided to them. To improve this process, a new management is put in place thanks to the stronger collaboration with the experts, made possible through the Technical Domains adapted to the Enquiries. Thus, all these solutions (defined in this work as first-level solutions), stated to propose a new management of the standardization activities, are formalized in an internal document (second-level solution) which provides a Governance to the standardization management, by defining the roles and the responsibilities and establishing the new processes.