Why Aerospace & Defense Needs PLM in 2025 - Siemens Teamcenter for Aerospace & Defense

For decades, complexity has been the norm for the aerospace and defense (A&D) industry, and most organizations have learned to navigate it with ingenuity, rigor, and grit. But what’s changed most in recent years is the pace, making PLM for aerospace and defense and modern aerospace PLM software a strategic necessity, not just an engineering tool.

Programs have become more ambitious—not just in scale, but in complexity and integration. Today’s aircraft, spacecraft, and defense platforms are expected to be smarter, more autonomous, and more environmentally responsible, while meeting mission-critical standards for safety, security, and interoperability. Electrification, fly-by-wire systems, AI-enabled decision-making, and digital battle management are no longer emerging technologies—they are rapidly becoming program requirements.

Yet each innovation adds layers of data, interdependency, and verification that must be managed in parallel across multiple teams and tools that often lack proper integration, standardization, or context.

In practice, managing this complexity manually or through isolated systems leads to slow decision-making, rework, and certification or accreditation challenges that ripple through the entire lifecycle. While many A&D organizations have modernized select engineering capabilities (e.g. simulation tools, digital twins, system modeling), these efforts often remain disconnected from the broader product and program infrastructure.

What makes PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) essential isn’t just managing this complexity. It’s turning it into a competitive advantage. And with increasing pressure from regulators, defense ministries, customers, and program timelines, PLM is increasingly seen not just as an engineering tool, but as a core enabler for cross-functional agility, mission assurance, and integrated program delivery.

5 Reasons Why PLM Is Essential for Aerospace & Defense

Let's break down the reasons why PLM has shifted from a support tool to a strategic necessity:

1. Rising Product and System Complexity

Modern A&D platforms now handle integration across hundreds to thousands of system interfaces, spanning across mechanical, electrical, software and mission systems. These aren’t just technical challenges, they’re organizational and systemic as well.

Each domain typically uses its own specialized tools, standards, and processes, making it difficult to manage and validate system-wide changes, particularly when teams rely on manual updates and lack real-time visibility.

A robust aerospace PLM software allows aerospace and defense companies to centralize engineering data, enforce process consistency, and enable real-time collaboration across all domains. This ensures changes are validated early, integration points are understood, and downstream implications are fully visible.

2. Accelerated Development Cycles

It's no secret that building and certifying A&D products is inherently complex. These systems are safety-critical by design, require strict adherence to evolving global regulations (e.g. DO-178C, ARP4754A, ITAR, DFARS, NATO standards, etc.), and they must meet rigorous performance, durability, and operational standards—often across extreme environments.

In addition, certification is a year-long process of exhaustive documentation, iterative testing, and multi-stakeholder validation, whose cost and time investment, in many cases, can exceed the cost of design itself.

At the same time, according to Deloitte, sustained growth in commercial aviation is placing intense pressure on OEMs and suppliers to accelerate design, development, and certification cycles, often compressing timelines by 20–30%.

Modern defense PLM software brings all critical teams (design, simulation, manufacturing, and compliance) into a shared environment where they can collaborate in real time, using consistent, version-controlled data. This unified approach ensures traceability and transparency across the entire lifecycle, allowing aerospace companies to accelerate development without compromising on safety, compliance, or quality standards.

3. Sustainability Demands

Sustainability in A&D isn’t just about SDG compliance. It’s about managing growing expectations from regulators, investors, and OEM customers who demand transparency, verifiability, and measurable action. Lifecycle assessments (LCAs), material passports, and recyclability scores must be tied back to specific components, suppliers, and product versions, which presents a massive data challenge.

Additionally, directives like the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the broader European Green Deal are ramping up expectations for full lifecycle transparency and environmental accountability. For aerospace companies already navigating complex regulations (like REACH, RoHS, ISO 14001, NATO and dual-use compliance), this adds a new layer of pressure to integrate sustainability from the earliest stages of design and development.

PLM systems make this possible by integrating sustainability KPIs directly into product and process workflows. This allows A&D companies to track, quantify, and align engineering and sourcing decisions, supporting PLM for sustainability reporting in aerospace especially when regulatory requirements are evolving, while generating auditable, report-ready ESG data.

4. Digital Transformation Enablement

Artificial intelligence is no longer a futuristic concept. It’s actively reshaping how A&D companies design, test, and manage their products. When integrated with technologies like digital twins, robotics, and smart factory systems, AI can significantly accelerate aerospace development cycles, helping teams uncover insights faster, reduce costly physical prototyping, anticipate risks earlier, and drive intelligent design reuse across multi-domain systems.

However, for AI to deliver on its potential, it requires an environment where data is centralized, structured, and contextual.  This is precisely where PLM becomes indispensable.

With AI, modern PLM systems evolve from static systems of record into dynamic systems of intelligence, providing the structured and connected backbone required to train AI on governed engineering data. They enable the digital thread in aerospace and defense programs and support advanced practices like MBSE, enabling real-time insights for design optimization, sourcing decisions, and production flow simulations. In this way, data becomes trustworthy, accessible, and interoperable across every stage of the lifecycle.

5. Global Supply Chain Complexity

A&D companies depend on vast, multi-tier supplier ecosystems to deliver critical components, subsystems, and increasingly software-driven systems. In today’s environment, where post-pandemic disruptions persist and aircraft programs demand unprecedented levels of customization and integration, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to coordinate design and engineering changes across dispersed suppliers without introducing delays, inconsistencies, or compliance risks.

Add to this the pressures of geopolitical instability, shifting trade alliances, and export controls, and the cost of poor coordination quickly becomes unsustainable.

PLM systems serve as the foundation for PLM supply chain management in aerospace and defense programs, helping manufacturers regain control. They offer centralized, version-controlled platforms for collaboration that support structured approvals, real-time data traceability, and synchronized BOM updates—ensuring that supply chain orchestration scales as complexity grows.

PLM Is the Foundational Layer for Aerospace & Defense Innovation

What started as a "nice-to-have" system for managing engineering data is now becoming a strategic investment, essential for staying competitive in the aerospace industry. According to CIMdata, over 65% of A&D OEMs are actively implementing digital thread strategies, with PLM platforms like Siemens Teamcenter at the heart of these transformations.

Let’s look at some of those examples:

• ‍Bye Aerospace used Siemens Teamcenter and NX to streamline their design and certification process, achieving a 66% reduction in engineering resources required, while accelerating time to compliance. This demonstrates how a unified PLM system can eliminate redundant work and ensure seamless data continuity across the development lifecycle.‍
• Northrop Grumman leveraged Siemens Teamcenter to establish a digital thread across defense programs. By connecting virtual and physical testing workflows, they improved traceability, accelerated certification cycles, and reduced weight in critical subsystems. This shows how Siemens solutions support defense organizations with mission assurance, compliance, and agility in highly regulated environments.

Accelerate Product Development with CLEVR & Siemens Teamcenter in Aerospace & Defense

Siemens Teamcenter for aerospace and defense is one of the most robust and widely adopted PLM systems. As part of the Siemens Xcelerator portfolio, it integrates seamlessly across engineering, manufacturing, and enterprise ecosystems—including ERP, MES, MBSE, and simulation environments. This enables A&D manufacturers to digitize and orchestrate every phase of product development, from concept through certification and into sustainment.

Teamcenter offers:

• Unified, multi-domain data and bill-of-materials (BOM) management
• Cloud-native deployment via Teamcenter X cloud PLM in aerospace and defense for scalability and faster time to value
• Built-in support for MBSE, sustainability metrics tracking, and digital twin enablement
• Secure, role-based collaboration across dispersed design and supplier networks
• Robust change and configuration management tailored to regulatory-intensive programs

At CLEVR, we have seen first-hand how A&D companies scale and future-proof their operations with Teamcenter. With over 30 years of experience implementing PLM in aerospace and defense, we help organizations navigate every stage of the transformation journey—from strategy and planning to system integration, data migration, and long-term support.

Our team specializes in guiding companies through the complexities of integrating Teamcenter into highly customized, multi-system landscapes, especially where legacy tools, compliance obligations, and distributed teams present unique challenges.

Whether you're optimizing traceability, enabling cross-domain collaboration, or unifying design and production workflows, CLEVR ensures that your PLM foundation is built with your needs in mind, embedding resilience, agility, and long-term growth into your operations.

Key Takeaway

The aerospace and defense industry are undergoing a period of rapid transformation, driven by technological disruption, rising regulatory demands, evolving sustainability targets, and increased pressure to bring smarter, more integrated products to market faster.

In this context, where traditional tools and siloed systems no longer meet the demands of modern aerospace programs, PLM for aerospace and defense has emerged as a critical backbone.

From accelerating development cycles and supporting AI adoption, to ensuring traceability across sustainability metrics and global supply chains, PLM enables organizations to manage complexity, drive innovation, and maintain compliance in one connected ecosystem.

At CLEVR, with decades of domain expertise, we help aerospace and defense companies unlock this potential, turning complexity into competitive advantage through smart PLM implementations tailored to their goals. By combining deep Siemens Teamcenter knowledge with agile development expertise, CLEVR helps organizations build secure PLM foundations while developing intuitive and compliant applications.

Whether you're starting your PLM journey or scaling an existing system, our team can advise on best practices, guide your system integration strategy, and support complex migrations, ensuring long-term success and faster ROI.

Get in touch to learn more or schedule a consultation.

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