Connecting the defence supply chain: TECHNIA's PLM connector for the MoD

TECHNIA is a leader in product lifecycle management (PLM) and systems integration, helping organisations across industries to bring products to market more efficiently. Its integration frameworks and middleware platforms enable secure, scalable data exchange across PLM, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and manufacturing systems. The company serves clients across defence, automotive, aerospace, industrial equipment and Formula One. 

With a strong UK presence with global reach, and a track record on complex, secure integration projects, TECHNIA works at the point where engineering data meets enterprise technology. That combination of deep domain expertise and enterprise-grade connectivity is what brought the company to the Defence Testbed Accelerator.   

The opportunity

Defence manufacturing depends on technical data packs (TDPs). These are structured collections of design and manufacturing information that enable parts to be produced, repaired and replaced. In most UK defence organisations, this data sits locked inside individual original equipment manufacturer (OEM) PLM systems, each with its own structures, naming conventions and access controls. Moving TDPs securely between organisations, at speed, is harder than it should be, with no standardised method for sharing.

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) is actively working to change this. Long lead times and part obsolescence are recognised threats to equipment availability and UK defence capability. The solution the MoD is pursuing is a federated digital inventory of manufacturing data: a single, permissioned view of relevant TDP information that authorised partners can use to support distributed production, including 3D printing of components at remote sites. But getting there requires PLM connectivity infrastructure that, commonly, does not yet exist. 

Why the company joined the accelerator programme

The Defence Testbed Accelerator is delivered by Digital Catapult as part of the Made Smarter | Digital Supply Chain Hub, alongside the Ministry of Defence, the National Composites Centre (NCC) and the Manufacturing Technology Centre (MTC). The accelerator programme brought together five UK-based technology companies, working across two connected challenges, to develop and validate the infrastructure needed to support secure, distributed defence manufacturing.  

Challenge A focused on building connector-layer software that links to different OEM PLM systems within the testbed, and Challenge B focused on developing a federated digital inventory that aggregates standardised metadata from multiple OEM connectors.

TECHNIA's motivation to join the programme was twofold: the technical territory was familiar, and the accelerator offered something that is difficult to replicate in a normal commercial context, namely direct access to MoD-aligned requirements, real OEM PLM environments, and the organisations that would ultimately use the output.

“This project provided a timely opportunity for TECHNIA to show how technology and knowledge gathered across established industries could be applied at pace and scale to the MoD's requirements. It also presented a unique opportunity for our team to work simultaneously across multiple systems and with multiple development partners, then compare our solution with those of the other Challenge A teams in our cohort.”

Andrew Early, Technical Director, TECHNIA

The solution

TECHNIA worked on Challenge A: building a TDP–Digital Inventory connector capable of extracting metadata from multiple OEM PLM systems and standardising it into a form that could feed a federated digital inventory. The connector was built on TIF (the TECHNIA Integration Framework), an enterprise-grade platform already deployed at scale across defence, automotive and aerospace clients.

Working within the testbed infrastructure, and drawing on TECHNIA's own 3DEXPERIENCE environment to fill gaps where PLM instances lacked complete REpresentational State Transfer (REST) endpoints, the team established secure connections to all available PLM systems, retrieved TDP metadata via REST APIs, and transformed it into a neutral JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) schema ready for downstream use. That output was then consumed by the Challenge B teams, Vistory Group and Quaisr, who were building the federated inventory platforms that would make the data accessible across the supply chain.  

Collaboration between the two challenge groups pushed the connector beyond its original scope. Additional metadata fields were added at the Challenge B participant's request, optional file and image transfers were introduced, and the transformation logic was extended to produce bespoke output formats alongside the neutral JSON. Input from the NCC and MTC helped align deliverables with MoD standards and real-world TDP requirements, including those around REST integration constraints that the testbed had initially exposed.

“Although the integration challenge looked complex from the outside, we found that TIF handled most scenarios with ease,” says Vishal Pawar, Solution Architect at TECHNIA. “Working through the programme as a team helped us refine the connector's behaviour in a real defence context, and it was satisfying to demonstrate just how effortlessly the platform adapts when put into practice.”

Outcomes & results

The programme produced a working, OEM-agnostic connector that can extract and standardise TDP metadata from multiple PLM environments without requiring any modifications to the underlying OEM systems. All transformation logic sits in the integration layer, meaning new suppliers and PLM variants can be onboarded through configurable mapping tables rather than bespoke development work each time.

TECHNIA projects that the framework could reduce onboarding effort by 50-70% per new OEM or PLM system. Across a defence supply chain where each new integration would otherwise require months of bilateral engagement, that represents a significant reduction in time and cost at every stage of expansion. The project also demonstrated that TIF's existing enterprise capabilities extend directly into the defence ecosystem with minimal adaptation, opening a clear commercial pathway into MoD programmes, prime contractors and suppliers focused on digital inventory and distributed manufacturing.

Visibility alongside defence primes such as Babcock, Thales, NP Aerospace and RBSL added a further dimension beyond the technical output – credibility and presence within a supply chain that TECHNIA is now actively pursuing.

Customer perspective

Rajbinder Sujan, Project Manager at TECHNIA, reflects on how the team navigated the programme's practical complexity: “We delivered a scalable, vendor-neutral PLM connector while navigating access limitations, gaps in available metadata and evolving programme requirements. Through coordinated development, a well-structured common data model and close collaboration with Challenge B teams, we kept the project on track and ensured steady technical progress.”

What distinguished the programme from a typical commercial engagement was the speed at which joint working across both challenge groups converged on shared design decisions. That would normally take far longer in a bilateral setting. Digital Catapult's coordination role was central to it, resolving blockers around system access, API definitions and cross-team interfaces, and keeping deliverables aligned with the MoD's long-term digital inventory ambitions. 

For TECHNIA, the case for a follow-on is already clear. “We would welcome a follow-on project," says Andrew Early, “as we believe a limited-scope, production-grade pilot would be possible to deliver in a similar timeframe to this first challenge.”