It started with an airshow and the afterburner of an F-15. That was 2005, the moment that drew Rob Armstrong to Leonardo as an operations graduate. Two decades later, he’s Vice President of Mechanical Engineering and one of the architects of the aerospace and defence group’s digital transformation in the UK.
Rob’s episode traces an arc that began modestly – getting production data onto screens back in 2006 – and grew into something far more coherent: the Future Factory Programme, a data-driven decision-making culture that now runs from the shop floor to the managing director’s leadership meetings, and proprietary tools built on the company’s own secure large language model. What changed over the years wasn’t the appetite for improvement but the discipline of anchoring every investment to a single strategic thread.
He’s candid about the missteps, including an early period when a transformation programme lacked the lifecycle governance Leonardo applies to its products. The lesson stuck: test before rollout, and build internal capability rather than leaning on outside resources. But his strongest theme is human – being sure businesses aren’t just deploying new ways of doing things that suck the joy out of coming to work.
Rob Armstrong is Vice President of Mechanical Engineering at Leonardo, a global aerospace, defence and security company ranking among the world’s top ten in its sector, with 53,000 employees and significant operations in the UK. Joining as an operations graduate in 2005, Rob has spent two decades driving engineering and manufacturing transformation at Leonardo, and is a key figure behind the company’s UK Future Factory Programme.
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