Sonaca España

From its production hub in Spain, Sonaca España (former Aciturri Aerostructures) delivers aerostructures for some of the world’s most demanding aerospace manufacturing programs including the Airbus A350, Dassault Falcon 10X and Embraer KC-390. The airframe supplier’s world-class reputation hinges on its ability to manage large, complex assemblies, tight tolerances and highly structured validation processes. That expertise now extends to emerging advanced air mobility programs like Vertical Aerospace’s VX4 – a winged electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft – which are both fast-moving and complex. Sonaca España supplies the airframe and structural components for the VX4 and, to keep pace with the program’s demands, manages that work in the 3DEXPERIENCE platform’s product lifecycle management (PLM) environment. Here, shared data and connected workflows are changing how Sonaca España handles product development and collaborates with its customers.

“Clients including Dassault Aviation and Vertical Aerospace work on the same platform as we, making data transfer between us much faster and far more efficient,” said Carina Kim-Darov, engineering and product systems manager at Sonaca España. “This allows us to save time and avoid losing information when our company needs to work with it.”

Across Sonaca España’s aerospace manufacturing programs, complexity shows up in very tangible ways. The company deals with thousands of part numbers, multiple configurations and engineering teams spread across different sites and disciplines, which must be effectively coordinated to meet tight delivery schedules.

Before the move to the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, much of that coordination relied on a mix of systems and local practices, and accessing data and aligning teams was often a manual effort.

“The main challenges that our company faces are the high complexity of our product structures, ensuring deliveries against very demanding dates and maintaining traceability across all products,” said Sergio Gil González, aeronautical senior engineer at Sonaca España.

The decision to adopt the 3DEXPERIENCE platform with ENOVIA as its central PLM environment was several years in the making. As major OEMs committed to the platform, Sonaca España recognized that alignment would strengthen customer relationships, support closer aerospace supplier management and accelerate programs as engineers would already be fluent in the same environment on both sides.

“Currently, we have around 500 active users on the platform across areas including design, manufacturing and quality,” Kim-Darov said. “Our goal is to onboard the entire company, which is approximately 2,500 users. As 3DEXPERIENCE is multidisciplinary, it allows different departments from design and engineering through quality to production to collaborate, add information and work on it.”

Any major aerospace digital transformation succeeds based on how well the organization adapts around it. At Sonaca España, spreadsheets, local folders and individual practices needed to be migrated to the 3DEXPERIENCE environment. Gil González led process development and data migration from legacy systems while coordinating training and day-to-day support across the business.

“We have a lot of users in the platform, and we know our success depends on user adoption,” Gil González said. “The technology is user-friendly, but adopting it requires change, which can be a challenge. We tried to make it smoother for all users, so we created groups with key users from each department focusing on their processes, and day-to-day teams to resolve doubts quickly and avoid any problems that could increase delays.”

Throughout the rollout, Sonaca España has worked closely with technology implementation partner CT CADTECH, whose hands-on expertise has been a constant, from the first training sessions to the intensive early weeks of the pilot project. The relationship stretches back two decades and that depth of trust has proved important at critical moments.

“CT CADTECH has been a key partner throughout the process,” Kim-Darov said. “They are very flexible and helpful, and they support us every day. When we started preventive maintenance and needed their help, they did it without hesitation. During the pilot project, which was very demanding in those first weeks, they gave us continuous support.”

CT CADTECH’s role has been to understand the specific pressures Sonaca España faces on the ground and to deliver technology solutions that address them, rather than applying a one-size-fits-all approach.

“In the end, technology has to add value to the business,” said Montse García, team leader at CT CADTECH Iberica. “Our aim is to help them get the most out of the 3DEXPERIENCE solutions, so that they can evolve their processes and maintain the level of competitiveness that positions them as a key player in this sector today.”

Sonaca España’s design setup reflects the reality of working with different OEMs, each with their own CAD systems and preferred ways of working. Rather than imposing standardization, the company has integrated its primary design applications within the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, preserving flexibility while maintaining consistency in how product data is managed and shared.

The result is a much tighter connection between design work and product structure. As soon as a designer uploads their work to the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, the full product structure is available across the organization, removing a step that previously required manual effort and risked introducing inconsistencies.

“We have improved design using 3D models on the platform, which allows us to detect and correct errors in early stages such as the validation and review phase,” Kim-Darov said. “Because we’re now better at catching these issues before manufacturing, we can avoid things like collision interference and improve the accuracy of the engineering bill of materials (EBOM) and, later, the manufacturing bill of materials (MBOM).”

On programs where Sonaca España has more influence over the design environment, the move toward CATIA on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform is well underway.

“The designer simply works in the CAD environment and we have the entire structure available,” Gil González said. “Working with the EBOM is easy because CATIA provides the information. In projects like the Vertical Aerospace VX4 or Dassault Aviation Falcon 10X, where we used CATIA on the platform, the feedback from designers was fantastic as they found this latest version of the solution much more intuitive.”

Managing product data across large, multi-site aerostructure programs has historically been one of the toughest engineering data governance challenges. Before moving to the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, Sonaca España’s engineering teams relied on spreadsheets and shared file systems to track part attributes, manage data versioning and distribute information, which became increasingly difficult to sustain as complexity grew.

“Now, with the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, we are sure the data is up to date and everyone can access it at the same time,” Gil González said. “And we’re talking about complex structures, some with more than 3,000 part numbers, so it drastically improves how we track everything.”

The move to a single governed data environment has also strengthened Sonaca España’s audit readiness and ability to meet aerospace certification requirements. This demand is only growing as the company takes on more complex certification-critical work in advanced air mobility. ENOVIA maintains full traceability within the day-to-day flow of engineering work to support aerospace quality management.

“We are developing all the workflows, document and design approval within the platform, so we have traceability from design through to production,” Gil González said. “Using ENOVIA, we can identify issues much earlier. For example, we’ve detected mistakes in documents and the EBOM that we hadn’t caught before, simply by being able to search by part number and work from a single data set. The audits are much easier too, as we can recover all the data and demonstrate that we are complying with requirements and regulations.”

As design and engineering workflows become more established on the platform, Sonaca España is now extending into project management and manufacturing. DELMIA is already delivering results across several of the company’s aerostructures plants, supporting the industrialization of production processes. The next step is to connect that work more closely to the engineering environment by bringing the MBOM onto the platform.

“We believe that this additional connectivity will really help plant engineering and development to reduce time and, above all, errors,” Kim-Darov said.

Tighter integration across design, engineering and manufacturing also supports Sonaca España’s sustainability objectives. Fewer physical prototypes, reduced rework and less wasted raw material from scrapped or rebuilt parts are all direct outcomes of a more connected digital development process. And as advanced air mobility concepts like Vertical Aerospace’s VX4 move towards eVTOL certification, that level of control – and connectedness – will help to determine how quickly they reach the market.

“The 3DEXPERIENCE platform is not the future for us; it is the present,” Gil González said. “It is the solution that’s driving forward the digital transformation of our company and the wider aerospace industry.”

According to Kim-Darov, the progress made so far is a great foundation for everything to come: “The greatest benefit of working on the platform is having a single source of truth – one place where all our data lives and everyone can access it,” she said. “We’ve worked hard to get there and we need to keep working to establish the platform as part of everyone's day-to-day work across the company. That is what will make the difference.”