While McTaggart is happy to see Boeing move to more off-the-shelf software, he said some custom functionality needed to be developed to meet its needs, but the amount of work "wasn't that great".

This "real experience" in implementing an SOA aims to cement HDH's position as a "tier-1" supplier of parts to the likes of Boeing and Airbus.

An additional benefit of an SOA is the ability to eliminate the largely manual, paper-based nature of production systems.

"Whenever we have an operator on the shop floor they have a big stack of paper; we go through about $100,000 a year in A4 paper," McTaggart said, adding the organization now has an increased emphasis on IT and corporate governance, and regulatory compliance which are important in the aspect of flying safely.

"You can go to one vendor to provide everything or take a best of breed approach and use SOA to put them together," he said. "If we could find a vendor to rip out systems we would, but we don't want to be locked into any one vendor."