EMT is a company certified by the German Armed Forces Aviation Authority for the development, manufacture and maintenance of aviation equipment. The company, which is headquartered in Penzberg, a city south of Munich, develops unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) and ground control stations for real-time aerial image analysis, flight mission planning and aircraft control.

As an aviation company, EMT must provide proof that it has implemented and validated all functional and regulatory requirements when developing its systems. "CIM DATABASE allows us to store a complete, digital file covering the lifecycle of each of our products in a central enterprise application," says EMT project manager Maximilian List. "This means that we will be able deal with the traceability issue much more easily in the future."

EMT intends to use CONTACT's PLM system to manage the configuration of products and tools, to speed up its complex approval procedures and for audit-trail capable documentation. The UAS manufacturer is therefore first of all implementing a project-specific documentation and article management facility with an approval process that is managed via parallel workflows and which is concluded with the digital signature of the engineer responsible for testing. Other expansion phases will address the use of CONTACT's XBOM Manager for management of the serial numbers and tool versions, integration of four different MCAD and ECAD systems and synchronization with the ERP system, among other things.

Unlike conventional drones, the high-tech aircraft manufactured by EMT have a long range and function properly under severe weather conditions and in difficult terrains like the arctic or desert. This has not only made the company the European market leader in the military segment but has also led to an increase in demand in the civilian sector. In this sector, the aircraft are used to perform missions related to public safety, for example in the event of a natural catastrophe or industrial disaster, to monitor traffic or to perform measurements related to climate protection.