Simon Johns was educated at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst and has served as an Infantry Officer with both the British and Australian Armies in a wide range of appointments and on operations around the world. Simon has extensive experience on the equipment procurement staff across a range of capabilities, and in procurement strategy and programme management roles. Simon leads Embraer’s Business Development and Sales activities in Europe and Africa. He has a particular focus on growing Embraer’s business for the company’s current portfolio including the C-390 Multi-Mission Tactical Airlifter, the A-29 Close Air Support & Advanced Trainer; and Embraer’s comprehensive Airborne ISR, MEDEVAC, C4i, Space, and Special Mission systems.
Embraer has achieved very high reliability and availability levels for the C-390 because it matched its experience in commercial aviation to apply advanced design and manufacturing techniques to meet the stringent reliability and availability requirements demanded by today’s air forces.
• Concept - How the Design process can deliver modern, affordable, low risk solutions with high availability rates
• Implementation – Combining rugged structures, Health Management Systems, and incorporation of Maintenance Steering Group (MSG)-3 philosophy
• Delivery – The overall reduction of resource demand across the Defence Lines of Development
• Maintaining cutting-edge performance of air platforms over longer life cycles: How has sustainment needed to change over the years as platforms intended to serve for 20-30 years are now in service for 40 ad 50 years?
• How to balance increasing sustainment cost with reliability and safety?
• Lessons learned from the 60-year service of the T-38
• Creating and justifying a sustainment plan resilient to changing budgets, requirements and the industrial supply chain.
• Multinational collaboration and partnerships in enhancing sustainment: Balancing incentives across stakeholders—OEMs and the industrial base, operators, maintenance depots and materiel commands
• Key investment priorities: Leveraging tenets of Industry 4.0: Additive manufacturing in mitigating supply shortfalls; HUMS—enabling near real-time extraction of digital data from key systems; AI & Machine Learning in data analytics; Establishing ways to swiftly source and certify new technologies.
• Identifying the key mission sets after “shock and awe”
• Generating and sustaining air missions: aerial refuelling, ISR, armed overwatch, strike
• Dealing with adversary autonomous systems and ROE
• Continuing to support front-line forces: conducting intra-theatre airlift in contested environments
• The logistics and resupply mission in the European theatre: identifying bottlenecks for rapid deployment of air and joint forces
• What strategies can be adopted to speed up acquisition or minimise schedule slippage on major programmes?
• How can the best strategies be identified? What realistic hurdles can arise from the implementation of such strategies?
• Focusing on mature or adapting commercially available technologies: Lessons learned from previous acquisitions.
• Assessing the impact of industrial consolidation and mitigation strategies.
• Principals of agile acquisition and how they relate to technological advances in manufacturing.
• Key investment priorities to 2025 in Eastern Europe.
Check out the incredible speaker line-up to see who will be joining Simon.
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