Why text analysis is so important in aerospace manufacturing

Text is just another form of data just like numbers or images, right? Yes, but in the last few months, travelling and talking to several people in our industry, I noticed how the interest around text analysis is rising. The recent boom in AI and the possibility offered by no-code analysis tools to non experts is showing how text analysis is an invaluable tool in aerospace manufacturing, offering also benefits in quality assurance, compliance, supply chain management, maintenance, decision-making, knowledge management, and risk mitigation.

Text is everywhere. let's use it

Just as an example, by analyzing textual data from technical documents, reports, and manuals, manufacturers can identify potential errors, discrepancies, or inconsistencies that might lead to product defects or safety issues; It enables companies to monitor and interpret regulatory changes and updates, ensuring compliance with evolving requirements; It complements numerical data analysis by extracting actionable insights from unstructured textual data, to enable manufacturers to take more informed decisions related to production processes, design changes, and resource allocation.

Aerospace and defense is different form other industries

Looking just at manufacturing, most industries are semi or fully automated, whether you’re filling seltzer cans or rolling magazine paper. Data is continuous and easy to tie together between pieces of equipment, making it readily accessible for predictive maintenance and OEE analytics. Aerospace is different.

With so many individual pieces of equipment in aerospace manufacturing, from CNCs to autoclaves, collecting data to build impactful data science models is more challenging. How do you use AI to identify the most common defects of a subassembly when it’s made by human hands? Or make sure all the parts on the BOM are up to date and kitted correctly?

Text analytics is a fast, straightforward and very effective way to dig into maintenance reports, find faster time to resolution in aircraft services, improve design and manage component risk. This is just the tip of the iceberg of text analytics and how you can leverage the reports and PDFs and documents you have already across the factory to improve your operations oversight and metrics.

An opportunity to learn more

If you want to dig more into these topics, I suggest you all to join Jasmin Folkers and Altair Data Scientist, Jeff Chowaniec, in a 1-hour webinar on October 11. From common challenges of extracting data from PDFs to simplifying text analysis models, they will show how to solve text analysis use cases faster and easier in the Altair RapidMiner data science platform, leveraging code-free modeling, automated data extraction and model deployment.

Click here to join: https://web.altair.com/text-analysis-aerospace