Aerospace and defense manufacturers scaling production from a handful of units to dozens a year need a different production system. It has to guide new operators to secure their 1st steps, give primes regular status update, and hold a consistent level of quality as volume climbs.
Most manufacturers are still running assembly on paper travelers and tests on scripts only one engineer can maintain. Evidence live on shared drives, and every team organizes the folder structure its own way. That system works at low volume through manual workarounds. At scale, it gets expensive, and worse, it stops being maintainable.
MES like Connektica give aerospace and defense manufacturers a single platform for guided assembly, automated test execution, and one-click compliance reporting. All of it can be deployed in as little as 8 weeks (Read EDGX's case study).
The order books are full:
Demand has far outpaced production capacity. The problem isn't the size of the shop floor or headcount. It's the infrastructure. The production system that held at 4 satellites or drones a year only holds at 40 through a lot of manual work and a handful of essential employees.
But it's fragile:
That's where the wall is. Even if manufacturers have the teams and the machines to meet demand, if the infrastructure was built for a handful of units, they won't reach full capacity.
A new program is about to double the volume you need to produce. The fastest and simplest lever is hiring new operators and engineers. That approach runs into three problems.
If test procedures depend on engineers, hiring them becomes a critical growth constraint. Qualified AIT engineers are hard to find, especially outside aerospace clusters, and they don't want to spend their days on repetitive production tasks. If your ramp depends on hiring them, expect delivery delays the moment recruiting slows down. It also hits margins as an engineer costs roughly 2x more than an operator.
Hiring less qualified staff introduces new risks. Without controls or guided procedures, a new operator needs several weeks to work independently. During that period, production slows to absorb higher error rates and rework, which erodes margin.
Every program needs a full-time resource just to produce status updates. Primes ask for these monthly, sometimes weekly, to keep their own commitments on track. At low volume, a program manager can pull that together in an hour or two. At high rates, it becomes a full-time job, eating into margin while delivering a worse service than competitors running real-time digital infrastructure.
So adding headcount can't be the only lever. New resources need to come alongside, or ideally after, the infrastructure required to handles volume is already in place.
Test cycles are the first bottleneck. The bench script one engineer wrote for a qualification campaign was never designed to run daily across multiple operators. When volume increases, that script becomes the slowdown: only one person knows how to set it up, results get logged by hand into Excel, and test reports take 1 to 2 hours to compile.
Compliance reporting comes second. At low volume, a printed PDF packet stays manageable. At higher rates, paper travelers fragmented across teams, operators working off different revisions without knowing it, and the as-built record reconstructed after the fact delay shipments and cost more than needed. The moment a prime asks for the full build record on a serial number from three months ago, the search begins.
And finally, quality and compliance evidence:
When the EN9100 auditor asks for the evidence trail on a unit, the answer should take one click. At most aerospace and defense manufacturers, it can take hours.
The three failure points above share a common cause. Test results, traveler status, and quality evidence all live in separate places, owned by different people, captured at different times. An MES replaces those disconnected tools with a single execution system where the work and the record happen at the same time.
On the test side, automated test bench orchestration replaces the scripts executable by one engineer. Operators run structured test sequences directly from the platform, instruments capture measurements automatically, and the report is generated from live data rather than assembled manually after the fact. Anywaves cut testing time on component tests by 97% after moving to automated bench execution (Read Anywaves’ case study) and ATEM saved over 2,500 hours on RF functional tests (Read ATEM’s case study). In both cases, the gain came from eliminating manual steps, that were acceptable at low volume, but became unsustainable once it grew.
For assembly, digital travelers replace paper packets. Operators follow guided work instructions on a PC or tablet, e-signatures capture each step as it's completed, and the as-built record builds itself in real time. When a prime asks for a status update on a specific serial number, it's already there. No searching or reconstructing evidence after the fact.
Finally, non-conformity reports (NCR) are created directly from the sequence step where the issue was found, capturing the full context automatically. Instrument calibration dates are checked automatically before a step is run. If a torque wrench is past its calibration date, the system blocks the step before the operator reaches it.
The result is a production system new operators can follow from day one, that holds quality at rate, and that primes can query on program status without the program manager spending hours on it.
The most common answer is after the peak. Once the program is stable, the team is in place, and there's time to do it properly. The problem is that it underestimates the risk of delay, defects, or losing the contract to a better-equipped competitor.
The right time is before that peak hits, with a pilot scoped to the assembly sequence or test campaign that's about to ramp, run by the operators who will actually run it at rate. This approach demonstrates gains quickly and wins support from the rest of the company, which speeds up the rollout. Following that model, Skynopy deployed a test sequence in 2 months (Read the case study) and freed up the two engineers who had been manually running RF campaigns for higher-value work.
Manufacturers who wait see their margins shrink as rework and hours spent manually on testing or compliance pile up. Over time, it's also a risk to the company's reputation and competitiveness against its rivals.
Anywaves, ATEM, and Skynopy each started with one scoped pilot before the ramp hit. If you want to see how that looked in practice, book a working session. We will walk through the execution model on a product that looks like yours.