Who they are
Airbus Helicopters is the rotorcraft division of Airbus, Europe’s leading aerospace group. Headquartered in Marignane, minutes from our own office, it designs, produces and supports civil and military rotorcraft, and is the world leader in the civil and parapublic helicopter market.
Its installed base runs to roughly 12,000 aircraft in service with around 3,000 operators across more than 150 countries. Production is only part of the job: every one of those aircraft has to be supported, often for thirty years or more.
The challenges
That scale creates problems specific to rotorcraft and to a certified aerospace and defence environment, not the generic challenges of manufacturing.
Configuration that never stops moving. Multiple product lines, heavy customer-specific tailoring, and continuous modification mean no two aircraft are quite alike, and documentation has to track every difference.
Two regulatory worlds at once. Civil and military programmes run side by side under different authorities, different evidence requirements, and different release processes.
Export control as an engineering constraint. Where data physically sits and who may reach it are design decisions, not IT preferences.
Continuing airworthiness. Every figure has to be traceable to source. A number nobody can source is an audit finding, not an insight.
Where we fit
Three programmes, none of them a conventional IT engagement:
- Export control — conformity across tangible goods and intangible transfers
- Financial control — recovery of overdue receivables
- Process modelling — workload and capacity planning across short, medium and long horizons
What connects them is not a technology. It is reconstructing what is actually true from records that disagree — and making the answer survive being questioned.