Operations Consulting for Aerospace and Defense Companies
Aerospace and defense is an industry where precision is not optional and the consequences of failure are measured in safety margins, not just dollars. The operational challenges that aerospace companies face are unique — not because the fundamental business problems are different, but because every process operates within a compliance and traceability framework that most consultants do not understand and therefore cannot work around effectively.
This creates a frustrating dynamic for aerospace operations leaders. You know where the inefficiencies are. You can see the manual processes that consume engineering hours, the bidding workflows that take days when they should take hours, the documentation requirements that are met through brute-force labor rather than intelligent systems. But bringing in outside help is risky, because most consultants either do not understand the regulatory context or try to “fix” processes in ways that would compromise your compliance posture.
Vectis Works takes a different approach. We work on the operational processes that surround your compliance requirements — bidding, documentation generation, testing data management, production scheduling, engineering workflows — without touching the compliance framework itself. We make the operational machinery that supports your quality and regulatory requirements work faster, more accurately, and with less manual effort.
To be clear about scope: We are not compliance consultants. We do not audit your AS9100 system or advise on ITAR. We optimize the operational processes that happen within and around your compliance framework. The bidding process. The documentation workflow. The engineering calculations. The production handoffs. The data management. These are business operations problems that happen to exist in a heavily regulated environment.
Common Aerospace and Defense Operational Challenges
Government Contract Bidding Complexity
Government contract bidding in aerospace is a category of complexity that most industries never encounter. Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) and Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS) create layers of pricing requirements, documentation standards, and compliance checkpoints that must be navigated on every bid. Add in technical specifications, material certifications, testing requirements, and the competitive dynamics of contract vehicles, and you have a bidding process that can consume days of senior technical and estimating time per opportunity.
The people who can navigate this complexity — who understand both the technical requirements and the commercial structure — are almost always your most experienced and most valuable people. Every hour they spend assembling bid packages is an hour they are not spending on production management, engineering oversight, or strategic pricing.
According to Salesforce’s State of Sales Report (6th Edition, 2024), only 28% of sales professionals expect their teams to hit 100% of annual quota. In aerospace contracting, where “sales” means navigating a multi-stage procurement process with extensive technical and regulatory requirements, this number reflects something fundamental: the bidding process itself is often so resource-intensive that companies cannot pursue enough opportunities to maintain a healthy win rate. Volume suffers because each bid consumes too much capacity.
Documentation and Traceability Overhead
Aerospace manufacturing generates documentation at a volume and precision level that dwarfs most other industries. Every component needs material certifications. Every process needs documented procedures. Every test needs recorded results. Every change needs tracked revisions. This documentation is not optional — it is the backbone of the quality and safety systems that the industry depends on.
The challenge is how this documentation gets produced and maintained. In many mid-market aerospace companies, documentation is still heavily manual. Engineers create drawings and work instructions by hand or by customizing templates one at a time. Test data is recorded in formats that make it difficult to aggregate or analyze. Revision tracking is managed through file naming conventions and shared drives rather than integrated systems. The documentation gets done — it has to — but the labor cost of producing it is far higher than it needs to be.
Quality Costs Compounded by Compliance
The American Society for Quality (ASQ) reports that quality-related costs typically run 15-20% of sales revenue, with some organizations experiencing costs as high as 40% of total operations. In aerospace, the cost of quality is amplified by the compliance layer. A quality escape in a standard manufacturing environment might result in a return and a replacement. A quality escape in aerospace can trigger formal corrective action processes, customer audits, contract penalties, and in severe cases, suspension from approved supplier lists. The stakes are higher, which means the systems need to be tighter — and the cost of inadequate quality systems is proportionally greater.
The hidden quality cost in many aerospace operations is not in the escapes that reach the customer — those are relatively rare because inspection processes catch most issues. The hidden cost is in the inspection itself: the hours of inspection labor, the parts that are scrapped or reworked at late stages, and the production delays caused by quality holds. These costs are accepted as “the cost of doing business in aerospace,” but a significant portion of them are driven by upstream process issues that could be addressed systematically.
Testing and Validation Processes
Aerospace components and assemblies undergo testing and validation processes that generate large volumes of data. Impact calculations, stress testing, environmental testing, fatigue analysis — each of these produces results that must be documented, analyzed, and retained. The engineering work to perform these analyses is necessary and valuable. The manual work to organize, calculate, and document the results is often not.
We have direct experience with this category of work. At an aerospace defense company, we worked on impact calculation fundamentals for safety equipment testing — the mathematical relationships that govern how test results are interpreted and validated. This kind of work requires understanding both the engineering principles and the computational logic well enough to systematize what would otherwise be manual analytical labor.
Production Scheduling in High-Mix Environments
Mid-market aerospace manufacturers often operate in high-mix, low-volume production environments. You might have dozens of active part numbers, each with different routings, different tooling requirements, different material lead times, and different testing protocols. Scheduling in this environment is a combinatorial problem that exceeds the capacity of spreadsheets and manual planning — but many companies have not invested in systems sophisticated enough to handle it.
The result is production schedules that are perpetually reactive. Jobs are expedited based on customer urgency rather than optimized for throughput. Machine utilization suffers because setups are not batched efficiently. On-time delivery metrics are maintained through heroic effort rather than systematic planning.
Where the Biggest Leaks Hide
The Bid-to-Award Ratio Problem
Many aerospace companies track their win rate on the bids they submit but do not track their total opportunity cost — the bids they could not pursue because they lacked the capacity to prepare them. When bidding takes days of senior technical time per opportunity, the natural response is to be selective about which opportunities to pursue. This selectivity reduces the visible win rate problem but masks the bigger issue: the company is competing for a fraction of the available opportunities because their bidding process cannot scale.
The math is straightforward. If your bid preparation process can handle 10 opportunities per month and your win rate is 30%, you are winning 3 contracts per month. If you could automate the mechanical elements of bid preparation and handle 25 opportunities per month at the same win rate, you are winning 7-8 contracts per month. The constraint was never the sales capability — it was the operational capacity of the bidding process.
Engineering Hours Consumed by Documentation
In most aerospace operations, engineers spend 25-40% of their time on documentation-related work: creating drawings, writing work instructions, assembling data packages, responding to customer documentation requests. This is engineering capacity being consumed by what is fundamentally an information assembly task. The engineering judgment — the design decisions, the analysis, the problem-solving — is a small fraction of the total time. The majority is mechanical: formatting, assembling, cross-referencing, and checking.
Every hour of engineering time spent on mechanical documentation work is an hour not spent on design improvement, process optimization, or new product development. In a labor market where experienced aerospace engineers are expensive and difficult to recruit, this misallocation of engineering capacity is one of the most expensive operational leaks in the industry.
Data Sitting in Silos
Aerospace companies generate enormous volumes of operational data: production metrics, quality records, test results, delivery performance, cost data. This data almost always exists in disconnected systems — the ERP, the quality management system, the test data repository, spreadsheets maintained by individual departments. The data exists, but nobody has built the connections that would allow it to be analyzed holistically.
When we connect these data sources, patterns emerge that are invisible in the siloed view. Quality issues that correlate with specific material lots. Delivery delays that trace back to predictable scheduling conflicts. Cost variances that reflect systematic estimating errors rather than random variation. The data has been telling the story all along — it just needed to be stitched together.
What We Have Seen Work
Automating Bid Preparation in Aerospace Components
A mid-market aerospace components manufacturer was spending hours on every government bid package. The bidding process required navigating complex pricing schedules, applying escalation calculations, assembling compliance documentation, and packaging everything into the required format. This work was performed by senior estimators — the same people responsible for production costing and margin analysis — creating a direct capacity conflict between bidding and operations.
We studied the bidding process in detail, reverse-engineered the mathematical relationships between the pricing variables, and built an automated system that performed the calculations and assembled the bid packages. The system encoded the estimator’s knowledge — the pricing logic, the escalation rules, the margin targets — into a repeatable process.
Bid preparation time dropped from hours to minutes. The impact was not just time savings — it was strategic. The company could now pursue a significantly larger number of opportunities without adding estimating headcount. The senior estimators shifted from mechanical bid assembly to strategic pricing and production management.
Impact Calculation Systems for Safety Equipment
At an aerospace defense company, we worked on the fundamental calculations behind impact testing for safety equipment. The work required understanding the physics of the testing environment, the mathematical relationships between test parameters, and the computational logic needed to derive results from raw test data.
This engagement exemplifies a pattern we see frequently in aerospace: the technical work is sound, but the calculation and documentation process is manual and labor-intensive. By understanding the fundamentals well enough to systematize them, we reduced what had been a time-consuming manual analytical process to something that could be executed reliably and consistently with far less engineering time per cycle.
Our Approach to Aerospace Operations
Working in aerospace requires understanding where the operational boundaries lie. We operate within the space between your compliance framework and your business operations — optimizing processes without compromising the quality and traceability systems that your certifications depend on.
Understand the operational landscape. We start by mapping the actual workflow — how work flows from opportunity through bidding, planning, production, testing, and delivery. We talk to the people doing the work at every stage, because the documented process and the actual process are rarely identical.
Identify the constraint within the compliance context. The constraint in aerospace operations is almost always in the information flow, not the physical production. Bidding bottlenecks, documentation labor, disconnected data, manual calculations — these are information problems that happen to exist in a precision manufacturing environment. We identify which one is actually limiting your throughput, margin, or capacity.
Build the system that eliminates it — within your framework. We build using open-source tools (n8n for workflow automation, Python for custom applications, Excel/VBA where appropriate) that integrate with your existing systems. Everything we build is designed to work within your quality framework, not around it. Our systems produce documented, traceable, auditable outputs because that is what your environment requires.
Deploy and validate. We implement the system, test it in your operational environment, and train your team. We do not hand off a design document and wish you luck. We deploy working systems and confirm they perform as specified.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do you work on compliance processes directly?
No. We are not compliance consultants and we do not advise on AS9100, ITAR, NADCAP, or regulatory requirements. What we do is optimize the operational processes that exist within and around your compliance framework — bidding, documentation generation, data management, production scheduling, engineering workflows. These are business operations problems that happen to be constrained by compliance requirements. We work within those constraints, not on them.
How do you ensure your systems do not compromise our quality or traceability requirements?
This is the right question, and it is the reason most generic consultants struggle in aerospace environments. We design every system to produce documented, traceable outputs that fit within your existing quality framework. When we automate a documentation process, the automated output meets the same format, content, and revision control requirements as the manual output it replaces. When we build analytical tools, they produce auditable calculation trails. We test within your operational environment before deployment, and your quality team reviews outputs before anything goes live.
What size aerospace companies do you typically work with?
We work with mid-market aerospace and defense companies — typically between $10M and $100M in revenue. These are companies large enough to have real operational complexity (multiple product lines, government and commercial customers, significant documentation requirements) but often too lean to have dedicated process improvement teams or internal software development capability. They know where the inefficiencies are but do not have the bandwidth to build the systems that would fix them.
How long does a typical engagement take?
It depends on the scope of the constraint. Some engagements — like automating a bidding process — can be scoped and delivered in weeks. Others — like building a custom analytical platform or redesigning a documentation workflow — may run several months. We scope based on the specific problem, not on a pre-defined engagement model. Every engagement produces a deployed, working system, not a recommendation for future work.
Next Steps
If you run an aerospace or defense operation and the manual processes around your bidding, documentation, or production workflows are consuming more engineering and estimating capacity than they should, here is where to start:
Profit Multiplier Session — A half-day intensive where we identify the single highest-impact operational constraint in your operation. You will walk away knowing exactly where the biggest capacity leak is and what it would take to close it.
Or, if you prefer to start with a conversation: Schedule a 30-minute fit call.
Related pages: Manufacturing Operations Consulting | Process Optimization Consulting
Vectis Works — The bridge between insight and implementation.