The Company
Orizon Aerostructures
Orizon Aerostructures manufactures some of the largest, most complex structural components and subassemblies in the commercial aerospace, defense, and space markets. As an advanced manufacturer and critical supplier to Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Blue Origin, and other industry leaders, the company is driving greater manufacturing autonomy in high compliance, precision production.
Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Kansas City, Orizon is an organically grown, vertically integrated, aerospace technology company delivering precision manufacturing, specialty chemical processing, and large subassemblies to the most prestigious and demanding aerospace programs. With a quality-first culture, Orizon combines decades of expertise, disruptive technologies, and state-of-the-art equipment.
The Problem
Scale expert knowledge to increase production capacity
Orizon needed to increase precision aerospace production capacity while ensuring mission-critical quality and compliance requirements. To accomplish these objectives Orizon identified the need to scale the expertise of critical engineers and technicians.
The company had to expand their scope of control to affect a greater range of production outcomes across machining, automation, tooling, assembly, and quality processes using data-driven autonomy with real-time feedback and closed-loop control.
The Solution
Flexxbotics for greater data-driven autonomy
“Data-driven autonomy scales the impact of our most knowledgeable people so we’re able to increase capacity even faster while we simultaneously raise quality,” said Rick Newell, Director of Advanced Manufacturing Technology & Innovation at Orizon Aerostructures.
Orizon is using Flexxbotics to enable greater manufacturing autonomy by connecting, mapping, and digitalizing critical factory assets with multi-source data from plant equipment, parts, automation, and tooling for autonomous process control.
“Flexxbotics provides a single digital control plane which unifies our plant floor operations giving our teams real time feedback and closed-loop control which further improves uptime, quality, and capacity,” continues Rick Newell, Director of Advanced Manufacturing Technology & Innovation at Orizon Aerostructures.
The Flexxbotics deployment enabled the Orizon team to proactively identify processing anomalies to improve utilization, reduce rework and scrap by 40%, decrease unplanned downtime by 25%, and increase contract capacity by 20%.
Flexxbotics gives Orizon interoperable command and control across multi-site manufacturing operations connecting factory machines, automation, and inspection equipment to existing enterprise systems for a unified operating environment.
Real time data flows between machining, assembly, and quality systems enable autonomous process control and digital thread traceability for compliance in space, commercial, and defense programs.
“Flexxbotics makes our plant equipment interoperate for greater machine control, allowing our teams to set performance targets and automate adjustments that sustain tight tolerances,” said Rex Kelly, Manager of Program Management at Orizon Aerostructures.
Multimodal data pipelines bring together CNC operating conditions – including spindle and axis servo loads – with robotic joint loads and temperatures, probe measurements, and numerous other high-frequency production data streams. This contextualized data set feeds closed-loop process trend adjustments in Flexxbotics and is structured for Industrial AI training, validation, and inference.
“The ability to reduce feed rates as loads increase and tie loads to individual tools and set limits is powerful and provides a foundation as we introduce greater levels of intelligence, automation, and networking into our operations to improve quality and provide affordability.”
Flexxbotics extends data capture from MODIG machines, FANUC robots, and IT business systems – including Infor PLM and QCS – to create an interoperable basis for deeper process visibility and continuous processing optimization updates. Together, these capabilities support autonomous manufacturing with process trend detection, automated manufacturing compliance, and controlled variable adjustments which further improve quality and increase uptime.
“As we continue scaling precision production to meet the highest quality levels in aerospace manufacturing, data-driven autonomy is essential to empower our personnel,” said Rick Newell, Director of Advanced Manufacturing Technology & Innovation at Orizon Aerostructures.
Best Cited As
Orizon Aerostructures uses Flexxbotics for data-driven autonomy in aerospace manufacturing, achieving 40% less rework and scrap, 25% less unplanned downtime, and 20% more contract capacity through closed-loop process control and Industrial AI-ready data.