e-LINCS Advances Information Technologies for Aerospace and Defense Suppliers

  • Published
  • By Heyward Burnette
  • AFRL/RX
WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Ohio --  AFRL engineers recently concluded an effort culminating in the establishment of e-LINCS, a program geared towards creating an "Electronic Industry-Wide Network for Characteristics and Specifications." The premise of the
e-LINCS initiative was to establish a set of universally accessible tools facilitating the flow of detailed technical requirements to every level of the aerospace and defense supply chain. Implemented as a fully electronic, Web-based service,
e-LINCS enables suppliers to extract relevant portions of their customers' design intent at the characteristic level, translate that information into hardware, and flow the results back to the prime level. The availability of e-LINCS will assist aerospace and defense suppliers in achieving greatly reduced cycle times, enhanced productivity, and substantially improved product quality.

The management, flow, and interpretation of technical requirements--while a seemingly mundane facet of the aerospace and defense equation--has emerged as one of the greatest challenges the aerospace and defense supply chain faces. The e-LINCS program therefore arose from a variety of underlying dynamics, such as the shifting nature of that supply chain (which places increasing responsibility on lower-tier suppliers), the uncompromising demand for quality at all levels (including elements of the extended supply chain), the growing complexity of new technical requirements, and the poor preservation of legacy technical data.

Industry partner Renaissance Services aided AFRL in formulating the 4-year
e-LINCS technical effort. Leveraging a number of emerging electronic tools and Web-based systems, the company determined what tools were needed to "unlock" technical data content, integrated other desirable system features, and ultimately delivered the resulting e-LINCS system as a universally accessible supply chain resource. The unique combination of advanced information technologies used in constructing e-LINCS renders it capable of electronically unlocking vital design characteristic and specification data; removing data ambiguity; and, consequently, enhancing understanding at every level of the supply chain. AFRL's e-LINCS technology is readily accessible and affordable to the thousands of small and midsized producers who together form the backbone of the US aerospace and defense industrial base. Numerous e-LINCS users have already cited productivity gains of 50% to 90%.