Meeting FAA Demands: Aerospace Pioneer Achieves Compliance and Traceability with Composable MES

The global aerospace industry, valued at over $350 billion, is undergoing rapid transformation driven by the rise of autonomous aircraft, growing demand, and the need for scalable, compliant manufacturing solutions that can keep pace with technological innovation and regulatory complexity.

This innovative aerospace company designs and builds electric autonomous aircraft capable of performing a diverse mission set. As the first and only company to achieve commercial certification for an electric autonomous airplane, they have had to scale rapidly to meet demand, while continuously innovating across their production processes.

As they ramped up their production, their operations were faced with a series of growing challenges

The reliance on paper-based work instructions significantly limited real-time visibility into production activities and led to inconsistencies in execution across the shop floor. At the same time, siloed systems hindered data transparency, making it difficult for teams to operate with a shared understanding of progress and performance.

This challenge was further compounded by the complexity of the assemblies involved—ranging from advanced composites to intricate electrical subsystems—each of which required seamless coordination across multiple workcenters. Additionally, strict compliance requirements from regulatory bodies such as the FAA mandated extensive traceability and accurate, accessible digital records to ensure audit readiness and quality assurance.

“Especially since there's thousands of parts on our BOM, it's kind of hard to track the quality of every individual component as it comes in.” — Application Builder, Staff Manufacturing Engineer

Such a complex product and strict regulatory requirements from the FAA demanded a flexible and scalable solution—one that could enable full visibility into their manufacturing operations, integrate with their existing systems, and evolve with operational needs—all without placing undue burden on IT resources.

In a matter of months, they were able to digitize many of their key production processes using Tulip, including detailed sub-assembly guidance, integrated quality control, inventory tracking, digital work instructions, and real-time dashboards. This composable system enabled:

• Increased efficiency through elimination of paper-based workflows

• Improved traceability of inventory, serials, and work orders

• Enhanced regulatory compliance with accurate digital records

• Standardized processes across composite, electrical, and integration teams

• Greater agility through decentralized app building

• Streamlined reporting via real-time dashboards

The company leveraged Tulip’s platform to build a composable MES comprised of a variety of applications that could address a wide range of use cases across multiple departments. Their applications are currently deployed in several key areas of the value stream, including Composites, Electrical Subsystems, and Final Integration.

Here’s what they built:

1. Digitized Work Instructions

Interactive Tulip apps replaced paper-based SOPs with digital, interactive workflows accessible via tablets on the shop floor. These workflows guide operators step-by-step, have built in data collection and error-proofing, and are fully version-controlled. These apps ensure that processes are executed consistently, allow for new operators to be onboarded faster, and capture data in real-time to enhance visibility and traceability.

2. Integration with Existing Systems

To reduce the need for operators on the shop floor to juggle multiple systems, the team took advantage of Tulip’s open architecture to integrate with a number of their key business systems, including:

• OpenBOM for real-time synchronization of bills of materials

• Asana for tracking quality related corrective actions

• Google Drive for document access and file storage

3. Quality & Traceability

In order to improve quality and enable traceability of components and sub-systems, they built apps to help operators perform quality checks and validation of completed or in-progress assemblies. These apps enabled the creation of serial numbers, tracking of inventory levels, and management of work orders, as well as guiding operators through critical quality checks demanded by aviation regulations.

4. Real-Time Dashboards

In order for managers to be able to make the right decisions, the team also built a number of high-level dashboards. These provided real-time insights into the current state of their operations, including the status of work orders, inventory levels, and key performance metrics to help keep production on track.

Instead of relying on their IT or external system integrators to develop these applications, this manufacturer leveraged a citizen development approach. Their process engineers who already knew their processes and understood the challenges operators faced on the shop floor were able to build and iterate on applications themselves using Tulip’s no-code platform.

• 3 internal app builders

• 50+ custom apps developed

• Deployed across 20+ interfaces

• 3 integrations with external systems

“There is a lot of support, tutorials, and information that makes it easy for a new user like myself to build useful apps quickly.”— Application Builder, Manufacturing Engineer

This approach significantly improved the agility of their manufacturing operations, allowing them to quickly adapt their applications to changing needs on the shop floor or updates to the design and production process of their aircraft.

In the spirit of citizen development, the team regularly hosts their own internal training sessions on Tulip to enable continuous learning and alignment across app builders. The lead app builder is actively training new citizen developers, ensuring platform knowledge is shared across the organization. They also plan to deploy Tulip applications at external contract manufacturers to standardize process execution and collect data from their suppliers.

The company is planning to continue iterating on their apps, and rolling out new ones across the rest of their operations, including maintenance and flight operations. The team is also planning to implement comprehensive genealogy tracking across all assemblies and sub-assemblies, significantly improving traceability. Additionally, a Center of Excellence will be established to govern Tulip usage and scale best practices throughout the organization. Integration with existing systems of record, such as ERP and PLM software, will ensure seamless data flow and consistency. They are also exploring adopting computer vision-based automations will drive further improvements in quality control processes.