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“Going faster is not just a tag line for us… it’s a dead serious business about keeping the Air Force competitive and dominant.”

Dr. Will Roper Former Assistant Secretary, U.S. Air Force for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics
Quote from Dr. Roper’s presentation: Fielding Tomorrow’s Air Force Faster and Smarter

The digital transformation is full speed ahead at the United States Air Force (USAF).

To reach its vision of a new era of competition and innovation in aviation, the USAF has to create advanced capabilities at a much faster rate. By using digital technologies, new aircraft are developed and delivered faster than ever before better to enable the Department of Defense (DoD) to work jointly with commercial and defense partners to increase the speed at which our nation delivers state-of-the-art capabilities.

To date, the USAF and the A&D industry have been leveraging Teamcenter as the digital thread to share digital twin models and connect the USAF to the defense industry ecosystem.

This latest announcement further strengthens our relationship. The United States Air Force has selected Siemens’ Teamcenter as the single solution to support the USAF in product lifecycle management (PLM) because of Teamcenter’s open architecture, interoperability, and widespread use across a large segment of A&D industry partners. Here’s the official press release.

What does this mean exactly?

It means Siemens Digital Industries Software is incredibly proud to support the United States Air Force with proven software supporting the USAF’s digital journey. As the USAF enterprise standard, the selection of Teamcenter follows a 2019 indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract for $24.6 million to Siemens for licensing, maintenance, and support.

By standardizing on the Siemens Xcelerator platform and Teamcenter, the United States Air Force can leverage a comprehensive solution, a modern, adaptable user-engagement model, and an open and flexible work environment across its entire ecosystem. Here’s a modern-day PLM solution that can manage any CAD or systems engineering authoring information. It connects people from diverse backgrounds and processes across functional silos, so projects are more easily shared, move more quickly, and have a lot less risk.

The digital journey underway at USAF

The United States Air Force is fully embracing virtual engineering, manufacturing, and sustainment techniques across the digital engineering spectrum. Programs such as the A-10 have seen the value of digital transformation. To innovate and tame complexity, the software and product development process must be more agile and collaborative. Technologies used have to be flexible and open to allow teams to simultaneously leverage legacy data – while bringing on board new and exciting technologies that promise to support faster delivery of capabilities and improve operational readiness.

We are proud to support the digital journey of the United States Air Force.

The Siemens Xcelerator portfolio

Teamcenter is part of the Siemens Xcelerator portfolio, a comprehensive and integrated software, services, and application development platform. Xcelerator is what empowers organizations and departments of all sizes to become digital enterprises. It’s a modern and flexible environment that can be personalized and adapted to fit industry-specific needs. With Xcelerator, the DoD and the A&D industry have the ability to integrate disparate repositories of program data. Not only that, but they can effectively share product performance details at any time, from any location.

Just one of the many advantages of a digitalized enterprise.

The future of the A&D industry – here today

This latest announcement illustrates how the Siemens digital transformation fosters innovation across the entire aerospace and defense industry, including the DoD, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), the supply base, and aerospace and defense start-up companies.

Siemens A&D is bringing the promise of the future to our customers today by introducing the next generation of digitalized product design, manufacturing, and sustainment.

Strap yourself in… we’re in for some exciting times at the U.S. Air Force.


Barry Chapman is the Vice President of Aerospace and Defense, Federal and Marine for Siemens Digital Industries Software. He is responsible for government and industry engagement and customer success. His teams work with customer and industry leaders to ensure the value from digital transformation programs are realized across the Aerospace and Defense, Marine, and U.S. Federal business. 

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