Joint Product Development

Joint development is critical to ground breaking new product, sharing risk and increasing the specialist resource are critical to success. SJB have been asked to be the bridge between large companies and worldwide supply chains to ensure product is developed on specification & schedule.

Each company moves at their own pace through their own systems creating a unique product development environment, robust process is required for all levels of interaction and involving the correct stakeholders at the correct time is critical to efficient development.

Airbus & Acro Aircraft Seating

Airbus approached our client at a trade show in Hamburg, our client immediately brought us on board to head up the joint collaboration. Our goal was to produce a set of concept economy seats that would be presented at the next year’s show as well as furnish a flying demonstrator and the airbus sales facility in Toulouse.

There were many challenges in this arrangement, particularly the large and geographically diverse nature of the airbus stakeholders (pre pandemic this was more of a challenge than the current climate).

Getting and keeping everyone on the same page and invested in the process was difficult, our solution was clear communication and documentation of the requirements deliverables and responsibilities. With Creatives, engineers and project managers involved we decided to use very image and infographic heavy documents to capture our creative audience with accompanying text for the more technical / legal details. This was key to keeping a the team engaged and also in signing off deliverables.

The project involved a 6 month design phase with, weekly progress meetings, 2 face to face design reviews in London, procurement of product, prototype build and customer first article inspection.

Four sets of triples were then dispatched in the midst of Brexit and exhibited in a private Airbus room at Aircraft Interior Expo and then moved to the airbus facility in Toulouse where pax testing was carried out.