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The Era Of The Defense Company ‘Dealer Showroom’ May Be Upon Us

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When the annual AUSA (Association of the United States Army) conference and trade show gets under way next week, thousands of exhibitors will cram into the convention center in Washington, D.C., to show their wares. Collins Aerospace will vie for attention amid the din. But with its new Customer Experience Center in Huntsville, Alabama, the company can have service leaders’ undivided attention year-round.

From the renown Detroit Auto Show, to the BaselWorld Watch & Jewelry show and CES, trade shows have long captured media and business attention. But in the last five years their influence and attendance has waned.

According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, revenue from business spending on trade show exhibitions in the U.S. has grown at a modest four percent per year since 2016 but declined by 64 percent in 2020 during the pandemic. The industry went from $15.58 billion in 2019 to $5.56 billion in 2020 and is projected not to return to 2019 levels until some time after 2025.

The aerospace and defense sector may be wakening to that reality. Defense behemoth Lockheed Martin LMT opened its own interactive virtual training-focused Innovation Demonstration Center in Orlando to military customers in 2014, “bringing Lockheed products and services to life” to quote Lockheed project engineer Raj Tanwar. Over the years, the company has opened a network of similar centers in Australia, the Middle East and the Virginia-D.C. area demonstrating its systems.

Other defense primes have established demonstration centers or virtual experience interfaces over the last decade — Bell’s Vertical Lift Center is an example — even as they attended trade shows or conducted series of “roadshow” type events at or near military installations around the country.

But Collins’ multi-million dollar investment in its new Customer Experience Center (CEC) signals a more thorough kind of engagement model, a “dealer showroom” if you will, located conveniently near the customer.

Try Before You Buy

The automotive business concept of bringing the customer into a local showroom to experience (see/feel/drive/discuss) the product has been around for almost a century. Over the last decade it has migrated upstream from brand-directed franchises to the brands themselves.

Porsche’s Experience Centers in Atlanta and Los Angeles exemplify the trend. On a more B2B level so does Volvo Trucks USA’s Customer Center in Dublin, VA.

Collins’ CEC combines the consumer and enterprise customer aspects of these with a dash of R&D capability and cross business-unit utility. It’s also a convenient 10-minute drive from the Army’s Redstone Arsenal in Hunstville, Alabama, offering easy access for the Army leaders, teams and program offices working on the service’s Future Vertical Lift (FVL) FVL programs.

“Our vision for this center,” says Collins vice president, strategic pursuits, John Esposito, “is to demonstrate different existing and potential capabilities to the Army and our prime customers... not only Collins capabilities but [broader] industry capabilities. We think this can really be an asset for proof-of-concept and try-before-you-buy procurement strategy.”

The Experience Center is a dedicated space designed to be refreshed and evolve as new open systems and integration possibilities emerge from Collins and its corporate cousins. Hunstville happens to be a unique location where all four of Raytheon Technologies Corporation’s subsidiary business units - Pratt & Whitney, Raytheon Intelligence & Space, Raytheon Missiles & Defense and Collins Aerospace - have physical facilities concentrated in one geographic area.

CEC has a whole digital wall where invitees can “drill into minute details and features of some of our most advanced products,” Esposito affirms. There’s an interactive digital table, similar to but larger in scale than one Collins will have at AUSA.

The centerpiece is a rotary-wing aircraft simulator/mock-up with a digital backbone architecture that allows plug and play flexibility for different capabilities and systems integration combinations.

A full flight deck, aft cabin, and electronics bay allow customers to experience varied mixes of hardware and software. Collins says Army representatives and others can see first-hand how the vehicle flies in high fidelity simulation with different systems and architectures plugged-in.

The flexibility has already been shown-off during a quiet mid-September opening of the facility. In a demonstration of potential air-launched effects capabilities for FVL to the Army, Collins integrated software from three small companies within its virtual vehicle architecture. The combined capabilities were then flown in a virtual operational scenario in the CEC simulator for Army representatives.

The setup allowed the small startup companies to display their capabilities to the Army within an integrated overall platform. “We can show off mature systems from our partner vendors,” Harold Tiedeman, Collins’ chief engineer, FVL says. “We give them a tool kit, some instructions and let them go.”

The result is a chance for the Army to get a look at small firm capabilities within an integrated system, an audition opportunity which startups usually lack the connections and resources to arrange. “They all came at their own expense, worked well with us on their own initiative given their [relative] lack of experience in this domain,” Tiedeman adds.

The model holds for physical systems as well. Army reps have already climbed into the simulator’s cabin to experience advanced troop seats developed by Collins. They’ve also been able to check out a Collins-developed interior lighting system designed to induce soldier restfulness or alertness depending on mission phases.

The demonstration possibilities are strikingly similar to those which Porsche and Volvo Trucks highlight and as with these commercial corollaries, they gain the customer’s full attention in a controlled environment.

More Than A Showroom

John Esposito is keen to emphasize that the CEC goes beyond a sales tool, calling it a “true test environment” and feedback loop. The center is co-located with Collins’ Tactical Communication and Maintenance Avionics facility, which does software work in support of Army aviation programs.

The company moved an engineering/prototyping team from Texas to the new space, adding additional R&D capability and bringing 70 new jobs to Huntsville. Collins envisions marrying the CEC via high speed secure datalinks to other closed-loop test environments so that virtual aircraft mission/air vehicle systems can be refined and evaluated by different groups within the Raytheon Technologies universe as well as the military.

“This is really meant to be a living, breathing environment,” Tiedeman stresses. “We can use it as a way to mature our own technology to bring things to the Army as rapidly as possible.”

The CEC is a test case Esposito acknowledges, explaining that as Covid-19 unfolded, the company noticed its downstream effect on trade shows, took a deep-breath and committed to investing in a show place of its own.

That investment is drawing visit requests from within the Army and without and Collins is still developing the CEC schedule and customer-facing conduits. Given Collins broader tactical communications, vehicle management and environmental systems capabilities, the company foresees the possibility of opening CECs in other locations.

“We did a little bit of the Field of Dreams thing – ‘build it and they will come,” says Esposito. “If this facility benefits our customers the way we believe it will, I have to think it’s the first investment on a long path. Time will tell.”

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