The Talent Program 2024/2025

In September 2024, four teams — made up of colleagues from various divisions, specialties, and nationalities — have been collaborating across departments and borders. In April 2025, they came together to present their final project pitches to the Management Team in Vienna.

The dedication, creativity, and teamwork shown over the past months have been truly impressive. We congratulate each team on their outstanding work and commitment!

Here’s a look at the innovative ideas and topics each team focused on:

Talent Mobility:
Introducing AEROconnect

Our challenge was to take talent mobility to the next phase by creating opportunities for employees to shape their own growth and contribute to Montana Aerospace’s workforce capability.

During the project, we learned that mobility isn’t just about changing jobs—it’s about sharing knowledge, connecting across functions, and learning together.

That led us to develop AEROconnect: a SharePoint- and MS Teams based platform that connects colleagues in digital hubs to share ideas, collaborate on innovation or explore new topics.

AEROconnect is easy to implement and designed to break down knowledge silos, foster collaboration, and build a culture of knowledge mobility.

Sales & Operations

The goal of our project, was to develop a Sales & Operations Planning white paper that has the ability to be successfully utilized across all Montana Aerospace divisions, starting with UAC Cefival.
S&OP is the single most important and critical cross-functional process. It ensures the balance between Customer Demand and Resources. If S&OP is done properly, it leads to significant returns, including increased revenue and profitability.
Why Cefival France? Montana Aerospace recently acquired the factory specialized in hard metal extrusions. The lack of S&OP is reflected in high inventory, erratic delivery performance, and unclear customer demand. Unfortunately, our project could not make a real difference at Cefival because of limited resources and operational priorities, but at least we introduced the basic concept. 

BusinesS Excellence

Our project goal was to enhance business excellence through innovative processes and tools. A major challenge for us was narrowing down this broad topic. We did this by conducting interviews with key stakeholders across the group to gather insights and define our scope based on business needs. This allowed us to define our objective: an innovation sharing framework fueled with top challenges and existing innovations.

This framework is built on four key engagement methods: Educate, Inspire, Collaborate and Activate. A centralized platform for sharing information and interacting, based on the solution developed by the Talent Mobility group, is complemented with dedicated events.

We envision a future where lasting relationships are built across our group and knowledge is exchanged openly.

AI in CAM Programming

We tackled the challenge of if and how to implement AI in CAM programming (Computer-Aided Manufacturing, e.g. for machining) across Montana Aerospace locations. CAM programming can be a labor- and time-intensive process, which has been prone to human errors and quality issues. Therefore, the potential for an AI-based solution was apparent.

During the project work, we analyzed many potential AI solutions and scrutinized the challenges of CAM programming as well as AI software integration. We managed to contribute to starting a pilot project with a renowned AI software provider at UAC Europe. The pilot is currently running and has the chance to be rolled out once successful.

This can create significant financial and non-financial benefits for Montana Aerospace, such as increased process speed and lower error rates.