Insightinar #2: Reaction Engines — implementing and securing buy-in for a BTRS tool Marc Arstall, Head of Design and Systems Engineering — Reaction Engines Samuel Carter, QRonos Product Manager — Quick Release_ Chaired by Rob Ferrone, Founding Director — Quick Release_ This is a machine-generated transcript, lightly tidied for readability. Speaker attributions and paragraph breaks have been added; the substance of the talk is preserved. --- ROB FERRONE: Hello everyone, good afternoon, welcome. It's just gone five past three here in Germany, just gone five past two in the UK, and nine o'clock on the east coast. I'm happy to be here once again hosting a QR_ Insightinar. I understand there are a lot of webinars in the world these days, so thank you very much for choosing ours. We've created something high-impact and valuable squeezed into a 25-minute package. For this webinar I'm very excited to be joined by Marc Arstall, Head of Design and Systems Engineering at Reaction Engines, who works on possibly the coolest project in aerospace right now. And we've got QR_'s Sam Carter as well, our QRonos product manager. At the end of this session, we'll have time for questions — but what you can do is ask them at any time during the session. Up in the right-hand corner there's a comment section, and if you see some questions you like, you can also vote them up. We're used to working with vehicles with top speeds in the low hundreds and ranges up to 500 miles. Reaction Engines, on the other hand, are creating products designed to travel thousands of miles at hypersonic speeds. Despite these product differences, there are universal similarities: complex engineering projects with complex supply chains and ambitious timings. The challenge is how you stitch those together and manage both the physical and digital activities across the entire organisation in a lightweight way. The focus today is going to be on how you select and implement such a solution. The system alone is not the answer — there are people involved. This is a principle at the heart of our beliefs and the products that we create. Very quickly, for those of you that are not familiar with Quick Release_: we operate within complex engineering environments and focus on enhancing product data quality and flow through every part of the business, from concept to manufacturing — tackling the biggest blockers of productivity and releasing engineers to focus on engineering rather than on data management. To do this, we've created a specialist product data management profession, and we're supported by in-house consulting and software development teams, all of whom have a product data management background. You'll see a contribution from each of these groups in the output today. That was an introduction to Quick Release_ in a couple of sentences. Now it's my great pleasure to hand over to Marc, who's going to introduce Reaction and talk you through his journey of discovery. Marc, over to you. --- MARC ARSTALL: Thanks. Great to be here this afternoon. Thanks to Rob and to Sam for inviting me to take part in today's session. For those of you who don't know what Reaction Engines do — if you follow us in the press or have seen some of our recent highlights — we're currently responsible for trying to develop a next-generation propulsion system that we call the SABRE™. SABRE stands for Synergetic Air Breathing Rocket Engine, and it quite literally takes the best of a jet engine and a rocket engine and creates a hybrid propulsion system. The heart of this system is a technology called the Pre-Cooler Heat Exchanger, which we've proven can take Mach 5 inlet temperatures. We can extract up to 400 megawatts of energy out of the air and use that heat recovery to drive the propulsion system. It's a really interesting time to be at Reaction, because we're trying to prove the core engine of the SABRE. We've chosen the technology, we've proven the heat-exchanger technology, and we're now looking at proving the entire engine cycle and demonstrating to the world that the SABRE is a true reality. Across the portfolio of what Reaction Engines does, we've got about 200 employees based just south of Oxford at the Culham Science Centre. Of those 200, we're about 140 engineers, and we administer something like 30 different projects — a range of the core SABRE project I just described, and also looking to spin out some of our heat-exchanger technology into aerospace, automotive and the energy industry. If you need advanced, lightweight, compact heat exchangers, then look at our technology. It really is some game-changing stuff. But the reality is that we are in a very competitive world, and our criteria for success are the same as any other business. We have to get those products and results out into the world, visible, to effectively keep ourselves operational, to keep things interesting, to keep our revenue and our shareholders, stakeholders and investors happy. So we have very similar problems to lots and lots of companies. We engineer lots of cutting-edge products like Rob was saying, we have supply chains to deal with, and we're really a company that's grown an awful lot over the last three years. We've recently deployed our internal PDM system and a brand-new manufacturing execution system. Establishing core processes, establishing supply chains, and really gluing all that together into a set of practices, procedures and a way of doing things has really been part of our growing pains as an organisation — trying to get that right. We've been working with Quick Release_ now for about twelve months. That journey started with trying to effectively outline and define our core product-to-delivery-type processes: our concept-to-purchase-order and our purchase-order-to-part-delivery processes. That's where our engagement started with Quick Release_, and we've been really happy to work with them closely over the last twelve months — particularly in these challenging times — to bring on board not just some of the process stuff, but also some of the QRonos journey, which we'll describe shortly. Sam. --- SAM CARTER: Hi. So yeah, as Marc mentioned, QRonos was a follow-on from a consulting engagement that QR_ was leading with Marc and his team. The initial element of onboarding people onto QRonos, to get the outcome we were looking for, was to track and find the reporting elements for the parts of his complex engineering projects. That starts with working out where we want to start tracking during the concept-to-PO process, through to where we wanted to end up looking for. Through interviews and engaging with Marc's wider team, we managed to get some good insights into how the business worked, what elements were needed, what weren't so needed. The one thing that I was interested in working with Reaction was how they worked out what key aspects and outcomes they were looking for in this implementation. Marc, can you highlight through the process element of it what we were looking to achieve, and what you were looking to get out of it? MARC ARSTALL: Yeah, the key for us in this process — and I think the thing we liked a lot — was that Quick Release_ were very determined to define what our process was. That was a really key element. It's quite easy to turn up and say "here's a blueprint of things that happen in industry, or things that might happen across a different sector, or things that might happen in the company". But the strength in this process implementation initially was that the Quick Release_ team worked with our senior team, as well as those operators of the processes, to try and define really what it is we were doing on a day-to-day basis. Because these processes happen — it's just about codifying them and making them more visible and transparent to day-to-day users, to try and create that consistency and efficiency you want. Quick Release_ were really good at effectively trying to extract that out of us and really develop the process that was ours — and not just someone else's tweaked for our needs. So it was really nice to get them in, and I think the time was spent with the people who operate the process, as well as expectations from some of the senior team, to drive what effectively became our own custom concept-to-purchase-order, and then purchase-order-to-product-delivery process. SAM CARTER: Great, thanks. Taking those stages that we defined through interviews and the previous work we'd done with Reaction, we wanted to implement QRonos to be the consolidation layer between the manufacturing execution system and the PLM solution — the ePDM instance that Reaction had already implemented. With that system implementation of QRonos, we wanted to ensure that the system wasn't going to be this cumbersome activity for all of these users to have to double-input data into different places and make sure that everything is aligned. The approach we actually took was to have users input their data into their native systems — the ePDM and the manufacturing execution system — and we utilised some custom-built connectors from our in-house development team into QRonos, to collect the data that made sense to give people part-by-part views that were as up-to-date as possible. So linking in with existing technologies. A lot of our work was based around making sure that the views we were getting and the data we were collecting was the right data, and the right fidelity. MARC ARSTALL: I think when QRonos was first introduced by the Quick Release_ team to myself and some others in the team, the advantage — and I think what it really brought to us — is that it's a very well-designed system. It provides that layer that sits on top of the PDM master systems and the MES master system. We all know that, whether you're an engineer, in procurement, or in project management, everyone has their own version of their Excel spreadsheet. It keeps them sane, keeps them able to keep on top of what they need to do when they need to do it. But really what QRonos does is provide like glue between the PDM system and the manufacturing execution system — and it also allows you to author and administer programme information on top of that: key dates that you require, actions between the teams, things that would allow people to engage around the bill of material. It really is the glue that keeps it all together. And the beauty about it is that it's live — whenever a part is released in the PDM system, you see it in QRonos. Whenever a purchase order is transacted, you see it in QRonos. What we're starting to see now is that users are starting to communicate through the QRonos tool, because it's the one place, the one single source of truth, where the teams all look at the same data snapshot. Whereas what we were seeing before is everyone had their own version of their Excel tracker, and constantly talking about whether the BOM was out of date or in date, where things have changed. We've literally been able to dump hundreds of Excel spreadsheets overnight and get people to literally go into one web-based portal, see the data visualised in a way that's useful and meaningful to them, slice the data through some good reports, and get some high-level metrics — and deep-dive deeper into the problem they're trying to answer on that day. The second point I'd also say — which is the thing I really sold to my leadership team — is that it's not just a tool, because I think people can see that. It would be the catalyst that effectively galvanises our process implementation. We've created a top-level process of trying to get parts from concept through to delivery, but how do we actually get people to follow that? Through the QRonos tool-set, you provide complete transparency and visibility to your engineering teams, your procurement teams, your manufacturing teams — and they go to QRonos to find out the answer. That's brilliant, because it starts to galvanise people into the process. They start to bring good practice into your PDM systems and into your manufacturing execution systems. Effectively, you win on multiple levels — because not only do you rely on people looking at the same information, but they're all now following the same process. So multiple levels of goodness, not just getting rid of lots of spreadsheets, which is a good thing anyway. SAM CARTER: Great, thanks. One of the key aspects of working with Quick Release_ on QRonos is that there is no typical implementation and there's no typical engagement when it comes to QRonos. The Reaction implementation resulted in about eight weeks of purely on-site support for two consultants. That ranges client to client — it can be a full on-site service deployment where we help — but in the Reaction case, we had two consultants on for eight weeks. Just because we left site, that didn't mean the implementation ended — we just handed a lot of that stuff over to Marc and his team. Marc, how did you go about getting buy-in for the rest of the business, not just the seniors, into QRonos? MARC ARSTALL: The key thing here is that any of you that have done a change journey or an implementation before will recognise that just installing a new tool is never the answer. You always have your early-adoption crew that are quite excited by getting something new and shiny to play with — but then trying to bring the rest of the community and the company with you is the uphill battle. The key really for us is that we worked really robustly with a small tight-knit group and trialled out a lot of the key functionality on a small project, and really worked hard with the Quick Release_ team to fix any particular issues. We worked on a series of fortnightly sprints with the Quick Release_ team to develop some key bits of user functionality or user requests which they or other clients of theirs also saw would be beneficial. We've kept and maintained those interactions going — we still hold a fortnightly update session with the Quick Release_ team, and we're nine months post our implementation phase. So it's really good dialogue with them. We've been able to administer that really well. Not only have we got a small team to iron out all the issues, but we then managed to create these "cheat sheets" you can see in front of you, which effectively — in a normal non-Covid world — would have been laminated and issued out to everyone's desk as a prompt for every user. Because a new tool can be a bit intimidating, the idea of these is really to provide people with a quick reference guide for some of the terminology and screens, some of the metrics and visuals that QRonos provides, and access to some of the features they aren't aware of. The third thing is some of the governance structure. The key here is that you need to embed this into your project governance structure. So not only have you got to have a tool that's good and doesn't ward people off because it doesn't do something their Excel spreadsheet used to do — but you've also got to embed it into your project structure that effectively allows people to have a weekly cadence of being able to look at their bill of material, manage their project, look at the things going wrong and quickly get to those answers. What we're now doing is building this into project day-to-day life, and these things are now just being put into our governance structure where we literally report straight out to the QRonos tool. We don't ask for any PowerPoint presentation through — we literally ask: "go to here, and present it from the system live, and answer any questions from the system." So yeah, it's a journey, like any implementation. Working with the Quick Release_ team, we've really got to a position now where we've got a tool, a system, and a community that are starting really to embrace it. SAM CARTER: Awesome. What are the next steps for Reaction in terms of using QRonos? What's next in the implementation journey? MARC ARSTALL: Good question. Like any organisation, we really want to embed this as part of the day-to-day life. So we want to get it across 100% of our projects — we're trying to get it into every team and project now — but also we're trying to develop key KPIs and reports that come straight out of this information and data that's present, and visibility to those key things that really stop programmes and projects happening successfully. Like BOM maturity, and the amount of drawings that need to be created, and the amount of purchase orders that need to be placed, and the parts that are being delivered and chased into stores. What we're really looking for is not just the past performance of how well you've done, but also the leading indicators which help to drive and unblock the issues that are happening in the future. It's part of day-to-day life. It's the lifeblood of the procurement, engineering, and programme management teams. It's just another part of doing the job well. So that's the next steps for us. SAM CARTER: Great. That's the end of our engagement and chat about how the previous deployments have gone. If anybody's particularly interested in getting a demo for the details of QRonos, feel free to reach out and contact me directly via my email, or go on to our website at quickrelease.co.uk/qronos where you can book a demo straight from there. And if anybody's interested in catching up and seeing what the Reaction guys are doing with their incredible new tech, please follow them at Reaction Engines on Twitter. I'll hand back to Rob now. --- ROB FERRONE: Fantastic, thank you very much Marc and Sam for sharing that exciting story. It looks complicated, and one of the big topics out there in the industry at the moment is system deployment and how you get that to be successful. So yeah, really interesting, thank you very much. There are a couple of questions. One of them is around the differences between a scientific product like this versus the traditional products that we work with — what the stark differences are. Marc, would you say? MARC ARSTALL: What I've seen from our side is that the science manifests itself in core rig tests which effectively require first-off one-off parts, rather than mass production parts. But we've got all the same battles of developing supply chains, procuring parts, doing design-for-manufacturing, getting that all in. So it really isn't that different from some of the more NPI or production projects that I've been part of. ROB FERRONE: Thank you. There's another question about review reporting. I liked the comment you made at the end there, Marc, about instead of creating a separate report, you use the tool and that is the report that you go from. How useful is that — is that something new? MARC ARSTALL: It's fundamental. We can sometimes all be in a world where we're creating PowerPoint presentations or reviews where we're having to create static data or copy-and-paste it into a PowerPoint slide. Whereas we need to be in a much more agile world where the metrics just pop up, you're able to tell a story. So I think that's great, if we can all do that. ROB FERRONE: Fantastic. Well listen, I'd like to thank you both very much for presenting today, and I'd also like to thank those people that tuned in and thank the people that watch this video after the date. As always, keep a look out on the Quick Release_ website and LinkedIn channel to see what other webinars we've got coming up. I look forward to spending some time with you again in the near future. Thank you very much, everyone.