SAE AeroTech America

March 9–11, 2021

GDCA’s Siku Thompson moderated a lively cross-industry panel, Obsolescence and Supply Chain Strategies—Supporting Long-Life Platforms and Systems, at SAE AeroTech America. Panel members included Ethan Plotkin, GDCA CEO; Marijan Jozic, SAE ITC; Charles Bourland, L3Harris; and Lino Massafra, NAI, who discussed how to proactively (rather than reactively) strategize, plan, and manage sustainment programs in the face of obsolescence challenges caused by supply chain degradation. The AeroTech 2021 program covered all the hottest and timeliest topics in aerospace and defense.

Parts and Material Management Working Group

April 14–15 and May 5th

The Parts and Material Management Working Group (P&MM WG) is a forum for promoting, shaping, and coordinating government and industry approaches to effective parts management. We wholeheartedly support this biannual event, and GDCA CEO Ethan Plotkin had the privilege of joining the industry panel with fellow panelists Mr. Vince Spellane, Mr. Allen Bertapelle (LMCO), and Mr. Steve Tanemura (Boeing) and moderator Mr. Bill Kobren. We’re looking forward to continued contribution to the P&MM WG initiative of fostering continuous improvement in defense and industry parts management processes and practices.

SAE Innovations in Mobility: Aerospace Digital Virtual Summit

Last May at the SAE Innovations in Mobility: Aerospace Digital Virtual Summit, GDCA OEM Relationship Director Tania Scroggie moderated a panel discussion called Innovation Is Not Enough—Supply Chain Resilience. Panelists (and masters at their art) Ethan Plotkin, GDCA CEO, and Daniel DiMase, president and CEO at Aerocyonics, discussed the work of current initiatives in standards, policies, and procedures to mitigate supply chain risks and challenges that are critical for a world that has grown dependent on microelectronics devices. Plotkin and DiMase discussed all the ongoing efforts and made a call to action to ensure supply chain resilience to support and sustain innovation.

DLA Aviation Industry Day

June 8–9

DLA Aviation Industry Day was an incredible virtual success. It was a great opportunity for industry and government to talk about cybersecurity expectations and CMMC.

First, industry folks should focus on assessing their compliance against 880-171 cybersecurity requirements; these are the same requirements specified in DFARS 252.204-7019 and 252.204-7020. Second, everyone stay calm—we’re all in this together.

DLA Aviation Industry Day is for manufacturers, dealers, distributors, consultants, and government officials to address current topics affecting the supply chain and to present opportunities on the horizon.

GDCA continues to create meaningful relationships around the proactive sustainment of embedded products that are critical to readiness, featuring new perspectives to better understand requirements and hot topics covering the entire acquisition life cycle.

• July 27-29, 2021 - Aviation & Missile Technology Consortium, Huntsville, Alabama
• December 13-16, 2021 - Parts and Material Management Working Group, Aurora, Colorado

Parts and Material Management Working Group

If you haven’t heard the news, the annual DMSMS conference has transformed into the Parts and Material Management Working Group.

After almost a decade of attending the DMSMS conference, we watched our community evolve from focusing on obsolescence management to looking more closely at life cycle sustainment best practices.

This shift brings to the forefront the need to proactively establish protocols in research and design (R&D) to deliver effective life cycle support plans (LCSPs) that will enable the DoD to confidently predict sustainment costs and activities for the foreseeable future.

The only thing left to do now is to get those PMMC abstracts completed by the August 16 deadline.

Announcement and Committee

GDCA and SAE have joint efforts in establishing a new track committee for the 2022 AeroTech conference (March 15–22) in Pasadena on supply chain, obsolescence, and sustainment.
If you want to share your knowledge and experience on the subject, we are looking for speakers and white papers on the following subjects:

• Supply chain resilience
• Obsolescence management/end of life (EOL)
• Sustainment of platforms, systems, and programs
• Product life cycle management (PLM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP)

We also welcome volunteers who would like to be part of the technical committee and/or review technical papers. For more information, please reach out to tscroggie@gdca.com or visit http://www.sae.org/aerotech.