Exostar, a specialist in business collaboration in aerospace and defense, life sciences and healthcare, recently announced the formation of an A&D Supply Chain Working Group. The Working Group includes executives from industry leaders such as BAE Systems, Boeing, General Dynamics, Huntington Ingalls, L3Harris, Leidos, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Rolls-Royce and the UK Ministry of Defence.

“A&D companies share supply and customer bases, as well as challenges in supply chain security, quality, and operational efficiency,” said Sri Yellepeddi, Senior Director of Supply Chain at Exostar. “It makes no sense for each of them to reinvent the wheel. Our vision was to bring them together to cooperatively find common ground, overcome these complex hurdles, and develop the process and functional plans for a next-gen supply chain platform that best serves the industry.”

The A&D Supply Chain Working Group’s activities focus on technology modernization roadmap alignment by identifying business drivers, their impact on the industry and how they translate into current and future supply chain solution and operations requirements. Today’s most pressing drivers include digital transformation, supply chain cybersecurity, network and application integration and interoperability, master data management and supplier qualification, sourcing and efficiency.

Members of the A&D Supply Chain Working Group identify non-competitive areas of alignment to incorporate into a next-generation solution. These include standards and forms to capture and manage supply chain information, data security methods and protections for sharing controlled unclassified information and covered defense information.

A&D Supply Chain Working Group defined initial themes to progress the industry journey roadmap:

• Collaboration
• Onboarding user experience
• E-sourcing 
• Interoperability
• Security

“Nations, states, and cyber criminals target companies belonging to the A&D supply chain, looking for vulnerabilities to exploit.  We need to ensure we engage in commerce with suppliers who meet security standards like CMMC,” said M. David Wilkins, Vice President of Contracts and Supply Chain at Raytheon. “The efforts of the Working Group will complement the Government’s program and will result in a more resilient supply chain, protecting important information without sacrificing cost, schedule, or quality.”

About Exostar

Exostar’s cloud-based platforms create exclusive communities within highly-regulated industries where organizations securely collaborate, share information, and operate compliantly.  Within these communities, we build trust.  More than 135,000 Aerospace and Defense organizations and agencies in over 150 countries trust Exostar to strengthen security, reduce expenditures, raise productivity, and help them achieve their missions.  Ten of the top twenty global biopharmaceutical companies rely on Exostar to help them speed new medicines and therapies to market.