>> From Boston Massachusets, it's the Cube, covering LiveWorx 18, brought to you by PTC. >> Welcome back to the seaport in Boston everybody, you're watching the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage and my name is Dave Vellante. We're here, this is day one of the PTC LiveWorx show, the confluence of internet of things, Edge Computing, AI, Block chains, security, a lot of innovation going on here in this new industry that's being formed out of a lot of older and existing incumbent industries. Lieutenant Bruce Litchfield is here, he's the VP of sustainment operations at Lockheed Martin. Bruce, thanks so much for coming on the Cube, appreciate you coming on. >> Thanks David, how are you today? >> I'm doing great thanks, it's a good show here, a lot of excitement, a lot of really interesting demos, we see you lot of movement here but I wonder if can talk about your military experience and how it relates to your current role at Lockheed Martin? >> Sure, so I spent 30 plus years in the military, and I retired as a lieutenant general so. >> Well, thank you for your service really. >> You know, it's an honor to serve and time when by fast and really got to work with some great people. And when you have that in your blood, it's hard to walk away and not continue service. I got a chance to work with Lockheed Martin who delivers the products and builds the products that I grew up with in the air force. Most of my career was in the sustainment and keeping them flying kind of aspect of the air force so now I get to work on them from a corporate perspective and continued to deliver products and capabilities and upgrade them so that tomorrow can be better than today. And that folks out in the field make sure that when the systems are needed and they have to use them, they're ready, capable, and, to go to, do whatever it is. >> Okay, sustainment is in your title and that's your current role, so by sustainment you mean, it works, when you need it to work, is that, describe that a little bit? That's right so, I use the simple term, keep them flying. And when you think about that, all over the world, 365 days a year, 27-7, you never know when a mission needs to take off or a soldier, sailor, eminent marine might need a capability to save a life, change the course of a battle, or otherwise make a difference. If a Lockheed Martin system's involved, I want to make sure it's there and ready to go and they don't have to worry about whether it's going to be able to succeed in the mission. >> So what's the role of technology in keeping systems up? I know in the IT world, it used to be just get two of everything, or three of everything, or four of everything, and just make things redundant. That kind of thinking's obviously evolved but what tech is Lockheed Martin bringing to this problem? >> If you look over the systems, and I'll just take, I came from the air force, and so the air force is flying weapon systems that are 50 plus years old along with we are delivering now the F35, which is the absolute latest in technology and capability. And so when I look at the evolution of technology over the time, it really is very impressive. I really do term sustainment as a systems engineering problem, it's making sure the part is there, it's making sure the system's reliable, it's making sure the tech data, it's making sure the support equipment. Anything that the maintenance person may need to get that jet airborne. Got to make sure it's there at the right time at the right place. And so if you look at the technology of how it's evolved over the year, it's much the same as our capability to go to war is, from what I would consider the command and control of World War Two or you just launched a jet. In fact we talked about it today. For one raid in World War Two, it took almost 200 bombers to hit one target, dropping over, almost a half a million tons of munitions, to today one aircraft can hit multiple targets with precision accuracy and keeping our air men safe, so the technology's evolved, along with how we sustain aircraft, which has really evolved over that time. >> So much more software obviously involved in aircraft today, how has the industry dealt with the increase in complexity as a result of things like software and code, but at the same time, it's clearly delivering more reliable systems and more efficient systems as you described? >> That's right, so think about in this way. Underpinning an inherent capability, such as the F35, is a reliability of this system. So if just take that one weapon system. So we have, right now, delivered over 300 aircraft and they're bedded down at over 14 locations, around the world. 74% of the items in that aircraft have never failed, over the time that they been out there, including over, about a hundred thousand hours worth of flight hours. Then when you start looking at that, almost 94% of them meet or exceed their liability requirements. So now we're just down to a few parts that we've got to make sure that we improve through regular upgrades that you would do under normal conditions to make the most reliable system. Then on top of that, you put the software embedded in the aircraft, it helps the folks on the flight line know what's failed, where it's failed and then know how to troubleshoot and so you've brought technology to a point of what I would call human interaction on the flight line. >> You talk a lot about predictive maintenance and anticipating failures. Presumably that is part of this capability, is that, I mean, how real is that? Is it in action today? Is it sort of a future thing or can you talk about that? >> So, it's very much in action today and we have a predictive health and what we're really trying to drive to is a condition based maintenance airplane. In other words, if you think about going to a commercial airline, you don't want it to fly to fail, you want to make sure that when ever you show up that it's ready, you board it and you take off. Well, we're evolving the technology that involves us to go to a condition based maintenance so we can do maintenance on the off time and when the aircraft not needed or what I would call a scheduled kind of time frame and that helps ensure that we don't just, it's mission ready whenever the pilots need it or when ever the sorty requirements call for it. >> Okay, so, let's talk about some of the challenges that you guys face in terms of bringing technology and sustaining this technology into whatever generation of aircraft? I think we're in fifth generation today? First of all what's fifth generation what are some of the challenges that you face? >> So let's start with fifth gen, so from an operational perspective, when someone says fifth gen technology, it's really taken into account what I would consider low visibility or in other words, making the aircraft hard to detect. It's putting avionic sensors on there so that the pilot knows what's going on around them and is able to fuse that information, to to give them very explicit information of what's happening on the battlefield and then be able to keep those that are supporting him informed of what's happening. It's a high maneuverability of the weapon system as well as speed that it goes. So there's the technology aspects of fifth gen and then what I like to refer to is fifth gen sustainment and that's really what we're doing at Lockheed Martin. What we want to be able to do is bring fifth gen sustainment capability to the field and drive the cost down so it's at a fourth gen or below the price of what current systems are. So get new technology, modern technology, sustain it at a very high readiness rate at a cost lower than what they currently see today. So fifth for fourth is one of the mantra's that we're trying to deliver, or at least drive the cost down, as low as possible. And one of the challenges that I would say is that balance between how do you have that capability and then keep the cost down? So you have to do things differently. You have to evolve to a new way of looking, so we talked about, a condition based maintenance or evolving to it and a capability where you don't fly to fail. You do it when the system's down when you do it on a scheduled basis to do that. At the same time you have to integrate all the capabilities together for software, to bring in analytics to the capabilities that you have and prognostics kind of maintenance to the field. And so it's a systems engineering, a complex instrument system's engineering problem so really that's what makes, kind of, I would call the strength of Lockheed Martin, which prides itself on being a technology company, making tomorrow better than today. >> Yeah, and a system's thinker. >> And a system's thinker. >> When you talk about these capabilities, observability, avionics capabilities, maneuverability, increased speeds, I just, it just jumps in my head, data. Let's talk about the role of data in analytics, I mean, the data explosion here, how are you dealing with all of that data? >> So we get close to a terabyte worth of information a day, and then how you exploit that really goes across the entirety of what I would call the sustainment ecosystem. And if you look at it, sustainment probably, we can break it down into about 11 different areas, whether it's supply chain, whether it's managing the inventory that we have within supply chain, whether it's in reliability, prognostics. Whether it's in the maintenance repair and overhaul capability. So we're bringing analytics across the entire spectrum of that and what we're out doing right now, is getting best of breed capabilities so that we can piece together a holistic picture to better sustain this weapon system, so data is the key to doing that. At the end of the day it's how do you bring that data and then bring it to what I would call the analog piece or the human being at the flight line that still has to maintain the parts. But we want to make sure the right parts at the right place at the right time. >> So the human is still the last mile. That terabyte a day, is the majority of that stored, it is persisted or is there a lot of it that's kind of throw away data? Can you? >> No, I mean, the great news id we capture that data and so we have a chance to go utilize it to improve not only what tomorrow is but if I look at analytics for sustainment piece, I look at it in three pieces. One is a dashboard, alright where are you? What's the status? Okay that's good, that's your speedometer. Then it is how do you do decision aids and tools, which means how do you make better decisions to affect maybe tomorrow's operation? Then there's a third part about it which is predictive analytics, how do I make decisions today that affect me three to five years apart and that I can make a decision today and have confidence that down the road that's absolutely going to be the right decision? >> And I mean, the first two, the status and the decision aids, those are real time or near real time. >> Very much so. >> Pretty much instantaneous types of things, that's a challenge obviously to deal with that. >> It is and then we are dealing with a defense. You got to be always cognizant of security, cyber security, and making sure that what you do keeps that data safe and make sure that no one be able to tamper with it so that your making real time decisions based on the known capabilities of the data and where it comes from. >> Well Bruce thank you very much for coming on the Cube. I hope you're enjoying the LiveWorx show. It was really a pleasure having you. >> David thank you, it's a great show and it's great to be here. >> Our pleasure. >> Okay, keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest. You're watching the Cube live, from LiveWorx in Boston. We'll be right back.