Product Development & Management

Certification and the Role It Plays in the eVTOL Aircraft Market

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eVOTL

In this blog, we recap an episode from the eVOTL Insights Podcast, titled “Episode 75: Cary Bryczek, Director of Solutions for A&D, Jama Software.”

Certification and the Role It Plays in the eVTOL Aircraft Market

eVTOL Insights is a leading source of news, information and analysis into the global electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft and urban air mobility markets. Since their launch in April 2020, they’ve been covering the latest industry news and offering insight for leading executives in the manned and unmanned market, across both passenger and cargo-carrying services. Their in-depth news and intelligence cover a range of different topics, from new company partnerships to industry updates on certification, infrastructure, battery developments and regulation.

As well as daily news, they interview industry professionals as part of their popular podcast series, produce short news videos for their YouTube channel and host virtual networking sessions on the final Friday of every month. To learn more, visit eVTOL Insights

eVOTL Insights Podcast

In Episode 75 of their podcast series, Cary Bryczek, Director of Solutions for Aerospace & Defense at Jama Software, is interviewed by Jason Pritchard, of eVTOL Insights, about the eVTOL aircraft market.

Cary is a member of the International Counsel on Systems Engineering MBSE initiative, a certified Configuration Management Professional (CM2-P), and a member of the Women in Aerospace organization. She is focused on helping companies utilize their data and digital capabilities to deliver aerospace and defense systems and services effectively. Her background has spanned both government civilian, defense contractor, and software vendor roles. At Jama Software, she has helped lead the company in Systems Engineering and Model-Based Systems Engineering domain expertise, as well as sales to help make Jama Connect a globally-recognized requirements management platform.

During this conversation, Cary talks about Jama Connect’s role in the eVTOL aircraft market, how it can help companies with the certification process, and some of the work it has been doing this year.

Click on the Play button below to listen to the episode and see below for a brief preview of that conversation.

 

Podcast Preview

Jason Pritchard: Hi, I’m Jason Pritchard and welcome to the eVTOL insights podcast. A brilliant show featured guests from companies in the EV tour aircraft and urban air mobility markets. Throughout each episode, we’ll be finding out about their exciting projects, which will help revolutionize the way we travel in future and get their insights into the current state of the industry.

In this episode, I’m joined by Cary Bryczek, director of solutions for Aerospace and Defense at Jama Software. Cary received her BS in electrical engineering from the University of Miami. She is a member of the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE), MBSE initiative, certified configuration management professional, and member of the Women in Aerospace Organization.

Cary is focused on helping companies utilize their data and digital capabilities to deliver aerospace and defense systems and services effectively. Her background has spanned both government civilian, defense contractor, and software vendor roles. At Jama, she has helped lead the company in systems engineering and model-based systems engineering domain expertise, as well as sales, helping to make Jama Connect a globally recognized ALM platform. She has more than 25 years of experience implementing systems engineering in the industrial and aerospace industries with roles at the US government, Lockheed Martin, PTC, and Jama Software. Cary, thank you so much for joining me on the eVTOL insights podcast.

Cary Bryczek: Thanks, Jason, it’s really great to be here. I’m excited to talk to your community.

Jason Pritchard: So we’ve talked a little bit about your background, but are you able to tell us a bit more about that and really how you came to work at Jama software?

Cary Bryczek: I’ve always been a technology geek. I went the electrical engineering route at university, but then in the working world, I came to find my place doing systems engineering more than anything else. The first part of my career did a lot of work with the government itself and then worked with Lockheed Martin. And then 16 years ago, one of the software vendors that was trying to sell software to our team said, “Hey, Cary, want to come join me at a new company and be my sales engineer?” After I asked him what that was, because I had never heard of a sales engineer before, I decided that it sounded super exciting and I made the career jump.

And then eight years ago, I joined Jama Software, who at the time was positioned as a startup poised to be a market disruptor. And I’ve enjoyed working every day for the past eight years, bringing the most modern tools technology to our customers, working with tiny, innovative startups to big companies. What I enjoy most is bringing the art of systems engineering and the discipline of regulatory compliance to new groups to help them achieve success. No two days at Jama Software are alike for me and I really love that about my job.

Jason Pritchard: Are you up to now tell our audience a bit more about Jama Software, for those of us in the audience that might be unfamiliar with the work that you do or even not necessarily in this industry as well? Are you able to tell us a bit more about the company’s role and really how that plays into the emerging eVTOL aircraft and urban air mobility market?

Cary Bryczek: I think we’re different than any other company that you have interviewed on your podcasts yet. We’re not making super interesting eVTOL vehicles. We’re a tools company. We’re known in the industry as, this market disruptor who has reinvented application lifecycle management. And now we’re the market leader in requirements management. There’s a big need in the eVTOL marketplace to modernize tools and use software as a solution for cloud-native, web-based applications that reduces the IT overhead.

eVTOL startups, they’re wanting to use their investment money in great engineering minds of people instead of building and maintaining tooling, or using decades-old tooling software that’s not purpose-built for aviation, and having to even retain staff on top of it all to keep it working. So Jama Connect is really its software that’s used throughout the certification process, which begins with definition and agreement of the working methods used for certification of the aircraft.

Related: 2022 Industry Predictions for Airborne Product and Systems Development 

Cary Bryczek: During this phase, customers are using Jama Connect to capture goals, objectives, marketing information, and even sales information. More importantly, they’re capturing the concept of operations for the air vehicle. But it’s also used to store the process documentation itself that describes the engineering process that the organization is going to use during the entire program and type certification process. The rest of the phases of the type certification process, it closely mirrors the classic systems engineering V model. And then Jama Connect, being an ALM tool, which is used to do things like requirements management, test management, manage traceability, do baseline control and configuration management, Jama Connect is used to author and maintain requirements, safety requirements, and assist in the validation of those requirements by facilitating things like review and approval mechanisms. Our software retains a full audit trail that can be reported on live, instantaneously, or even exported to document format When you have to share that with the ASO or the FAA.

Jama Connect, inside of the application is providing what we like to call it Live Traceability™, but the traceability meaning these the real time views of requirements, safety data, verification and validation, test data, even when that data is originating in other engineering tools. Early on in Jama Software’s career, as it was being developed, is that we wanted to make collaboration an important theme built into our engineering tool. Our founders were engineers themselves, and when they were working on contracts for other companies, they found that they had to do a lot of manual back and forth in review and approval, and things changed, and it was impossible to keep track of that. So we’ve decided that collaborative engineering, as part of the work that every engineer does in their day to day tasks, instead of handing off work to be recorded and filed by dedicated tool staff, is a real big game changer. The more people that you have collaborating and working on the data in the engineering tool, the more efficient the organization has become.

And so our vision is to really make the job of the certification engineer as sufficient as possible, because they’re the ones that, in a lot of cases, they have to look and analyze the audit trail. And then the systems engineers, like the chief systems engineers, they have to do the role of hearding the chickens to make sure that everybody stays on track and analyzing, making sure that everybody really follows that process. So having collaboration mechanisms built right into the software makes it so much easier for engineers to get their work done.

To listen to the entire podcast, visit: Cary Bryczek of Jama Software Talks Certification and the Role It Plays in the eVTOL Marketplace


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