Lean Practices to eliminate data waste in Aerospace & Defense operations

Data is the lifeblood of today’s aerospace and defense (A&D) operations – essential, omnipresent, and constantly expanding. But there’s a catch: much of it is useless. And worse, it’s expensive.

Every jet, satellite, and weapons system built today depends on an intricate web of digital systems generating staggering volumes of data. From early-stage design to final assembly and long-term sustainment, data is supposed to accelerate innovation and sharpen decision-making. But for many A&D manufacturers, it’s doing the opposite.

The uncomfortable truth? Most organizations are drowning in data they don’t need that clogs workflows, derails timelines, and drains budgets. This isn’t just an IT problem. It’s a strategic failure with real consequences: missed opportunities, higher risk, and a creeping drag on competitiveness. It’s time for senior leaders to take a hard look at the hidden cost of data waste and what it will take to fix it.

The rising cost of data waste is real…and accelerating

Data waste drives up costs in ways that may not be immediately apparent. But when you start looking for it, you realize it’s everywhere in the form of unnecessary hard costs, labor costs, and opportunity costs. It only takes some back-of-the-napkin math to make the scale of it start to come into focus.

Consider this real-world example: a respected design consultancy serving multiple A&D clients. Despite having several digital tools in place, the organization still leans heavily on paper – something all too common in our industry. Each year, this firm generates an astonishing 37,000 documents tied to client work. These documents – filled with data, specifications, and test results – vary in length from 10 to 200 pages. But here’s the problem: the company treats every single page as equally important because they have no reliable way to identify what’s truly valuable.

As a result, they default to saving everything – physically printing, boxing, and shipping more than 1,000 banker boxes of documentation annually to long-term storage. When issues come up – as they inevitably do – entire batches are shipped back, forcing engineers and project managers to sift through thousands of pages to find the handful of insights they actually need. And this cycle repeats itself several times a year.

The cost? Around $500,000 annually in storage and retrieval alone, not accounting for wasted time, delayed decisions, frustrated teams, and an ever-growing mountain of data adding no real value. Factor in the time senior engineers spend buried in boxes instead of solving problems, innovating, or supporting customers and the opportunity cost is staggering – and completely avoidable.

This is the hidden toll of data waste. It’s a wake-up call for any A&D leader who thinks inefficiencies are just the cost of doing business. They’re not. They’re a drag on performance, and they’re costing you – big time.

When data becomes a liability

Data waste isn’t just a paper problem. In fact, most inefficiencies today stem from digital data – massive volumes of data stored across disconnected systems rarely curated or filtered for value. Those inefficiencies come with a staggering price tag.

In one example, a turbine engine blade liberation incident triggered a formal investigation. Routine enough, until you realize analyzing the data required 31 people working full-time for 30 days. That’s one issue, on one system, in one aircraft. The estimated cost? Around $750,000 in labor. If this were a military aircraft, the cost could easily double due to higher engineering rates, pushing the total to $1.5 million.

Imagine the same incident occurring across multiple platforms, multiple systems, or aircraft. How many more months, how many more engineers, how much more cost would you absorb just to dig through disorganized data? And while you’re burning through resources on data triage, what’s the opportunity cost? What high-value engineering, innovation, or customer-facing work is being delayed or missed entirely?

Reducing data waste doesn’t just prevent delays – it can slash costs 50% to 75% in complex investigations like this. In time, that can translate to millions – even tens of millions – of dollars in annual savings depending on the size of your organization.

That’s just the start. Ask yourself:

1. How much time is your team wasting reconciling conflicting data inputs?
2. How many rework cycles are caused by outdated or inaccurate data?
3. How much effort goes into manually assembling accurate reports or compliance packages?
4. How often is digital transformation stalled because your data foundation is a mess?

Data waste isn’t just a nuisance, it’s a silent drain on operational performance, project timelines, and financial health. But it doesn’t have to be.

Fighting data waste with Lean practices

A&D teams know Lean as a proven way to boost efficiency, cut costs, and improve outcomes in manufacturing. But what if those same principles could unlock similar gains in your digital operations?

By applying Lean methodologies to how data is created, stored, and managed – especially within digital engineering, manufacturing engineering, and configuration management – your teams can become data waste warriors eliminating unnecessary complexity and accelerating decision-making.

The result? Less digital clutter, faster investigations, fewer rework cycles, and significant cost savings across the enterprise. It’s time to bring the same discipline that transformed your production lines to the data driving your programs. To accomplish this, there are steps A&D manufacturers can take to reduce existing data waste and prevent it before it’s created:

• Data intake – Applying Lean practices at the point of data intake is a direct lever companies can use to eliminate waste at the source. When teams bring in data without a clear plan for how it will be used or maintained, complexity grows fast. Using a Lean mindset to set purpose, ownership, and expected use upfront helps keep the system clean and focused.
• Reporting processes – Reporting is a significant driver of data propagation and other inefficient uses of datasets. Dashboards and metrics should earn their place. Otherwise, they risk becoming ongoing sources of data waste that steadily accumulate over time, causing inefficiencies that reverberate throughout the organization. If a report no longer supports decisions or improvements, it may not need to be maintained. Reviewing reporting outputs regularly helps teams focus on what still drives action.
• Data decommissioning – An effective way to slow the growth of data waste is to apply Lean principles and decommission data when it reaches the end of its life cycle. Tying decommissioning to life cycle milestones or system transitions helps ensure it happens at the right time when ownership and relevance are already under review.
• Ensuring system fit – Another source of data propagation and waste is when teams use tools not aligned with their roles or needs. This lack of system fit often forces employees to create application workarounds, requiring them to repeatedly copy and move data to complete tasks they need to perform. This is a significant source of inefficiency for employees and can create substantial amounts of duplicate data. It can introduce errors or gaps in the data when used in applications for which it was never intended.

Taking these steps reduces data waste and helps build trust in the data – and building trust is invaluable for preventing waste. When teams don’t trust what already exists, they rebuild it, adding duplication and delay. One way to improve trust is to observe how data is validated in practice. In Lean, this is called genba – the place where the work happens. Spending time with data validators can reveal which checks take time, where delays occur, and what could be automated or simplified. These insights are often hard to find in reports alone. But using data waste warrior tactics provides a framework for successfully combating data waste.

Fighting data waste for a secure future

Reducing waste and lowering costs are important outcomes of taking the steps outlined above, but there’s a larger benefit. I firmly believe fighting data waste is a critical way for A&D manufacturing engineers to support our overarching mission to secure the future.

We’re working as part of the sixth-gen fighter ecosystem, and one of the competitive differentiators against our adversaries is the way the A&D industry is leveraging digital processes to build better and faster. This is a vital way our industry is helping to ensure military readiness for the U.S. and its allies. Effective data strategies are a major asset for achieving our mission to secure the future, and fighting data waste is critical to remove roadblocks slowing work across the ecosystem. This is one key way engineers can contribute to a safer and more secure world.

iBase-t
https://www.ibaset.com

About the author: Chelsea Morgan is director of customer success at cloud software for the Aerospace and Defense industry company iBase-t.