In Stay Sharp Episode 126, Digital Product Series: iBase-t Solumina, co-hosts Jonathan Scott and Juliann Grant revisit the world of software provider iBase-t. In Stay Sharp Episode 123, CEO Naveen Poonian covered the company’s origin story, operations, and philosophy, and in this conversation with Sung Kim, CTO, the focus is on the company’s platform: Solumina.
Solumina’s capabilities break down into four core pillars: MES, eQMS, MRO, and a data model. An MES to support complex and serialized production, Sung says, “That’s the heart of Solumina. It manages routing work instructions, data collections, operator guidance, and real-time enforcement of the processes and the quality rules.” An electronic quality management system (eQMS) isn’t an add-on, but is embedded directly into execution, to extend traceability beyond your manufacturing organization to your supplier base. Maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) is also a core part of the platform, because it’s critical for A&D. Sung notes, “You’ve seen a lot of news around the MRO not getting properly done and consequences are catastrophic. It is very serious matter in the industry.”
Where Solumina Fits
The trio opens their conversation with how to categorize or classify Solumina among the alphabet soup of enterprise manufacturing platforms. Sung acknowledges that people tend to call Solumina a manufacturing execution system (MES) but says that sells the platform short. He prefers to describe it as a manufacturing operations management (MOM) platform, one that’s purpose-built for aerospace and defense (A&D). “It sits at the intersection of MES, quality, maintenance, and model-based manufacturing,” he says. “It actually acts as a digital backbone that connects engineering intent to execution on the shop floor and into sustainment.”
Sung explains that Solumina is designed for situations in which failure isn’t an option—complex, highly regulated environments where you have to cope with constant changes, as well as traceability and auditability for compliance purposes. Manufacturers consider what he refers to as an “A&D-grade operational system of record” or an operating system for A&D manufacturing to be a critical system that can’t be down.
Sung Kim, Chief Product and Technology Officer
The fourth pillar, a unified data model, ties the other three together and supports model-based and AI-driven operations. As Jonathan says, the data model “connects to the AI, the BI, the things that you do to give people insight into the data that they’re collecting. That data model is giving you that insight.” Data is critical to everyone these days—it’s at the core of how people do digital, Jonathan adds—but not everyone is good at it. And almost no one is talking about it as a core capability, but it should be. “That’s a place where I think even more over time, people are going to come to see it is a feature,” he says. “It’s a capability. Because with AI, if you don’t have data in the right context, your AI is not going to give you the results you want.”
How It’s Used
Solumina is most often integrated with PLM systems for engineering data and with ERP systems for materials and finances, Sung says, and they’re also starting to do more integrations with IoT automation and other systems. The key point he makes about integration is that it can’t go one way only. “It has to be bidirectional, meaning execution data will have to influence the design decisions and engineering decisions,” he says. Like many other enterprise platforms, Solumina tends to be successfully installed in a phased approach, starting with stabilizing core execution and data integrity and moving to integrations in a second phase.
Solumina’s flexibility and usability have evolved along with the technology behind the platform. The applications architecture evolved from two-tier (client and database) at its creation in the 1990s to three-tier (client, application server, and database) in later years. More recently they’ve moved to native cloud architecture, as well as containerized microservices suitable for different installations. “You want to run it on-prem, you want to run it on cloud—your option,” Jonathan says. “You guys aren’t forcing people down that SaaS path, but you’re giving them the option because of the technology architecture you’ve picked.”
Sung closes the conversation by emphasizing that, technology aside, Solumina represents actionable institutional knowledge. “Solumina exists to make the most complex manufacturing environments predictable, compliant, and scalable,” he says. “That’s what Solumina is.”
Learn More About AI in Use
The full podcast contains more discussion and details on a variety of topics, including why Jonathan says the “golden triangle of manufacturing” is what you need to run your business in complex markets, why Sung believes the unified data model is crucial for manufacturing operations, what the most important part of upgrading Solumina’s user experience to a browser-based UI was, and more.
Be sure to check out Stay Sharp Episode 126: Digital Product Series: iBase-t Solumina and join us each week for a new podcast.
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