Who they are
Capgemini is one of the world’s largest technology and engineering services groups, founded in Paris in 1967, now over 400,000 people, with a named aerospace practice and an engineering bench running to six figures on its own.
It is a prime contractor. When an aerospace manufacturer needs a programme run end to end, Capgemini holds the mandate, the client relationship and the accountability for delivering it.
Why a boutique gets called in
A group that size does not lack engineers. It has more of them than we will ever have. So the interesting question is why a firm with its own vast bench brings in a specialist partner at all.
Qualification comes first. A prime carries the risk for whatever a subcontractor does on its client’s programme. Before anyone reaches the work there is a supplier bar to clear: references, insurance, security posture, evidence you have done the thing before in a regulated setting. That vetting is the credential. It is not granted on the strength of a pitch.
Depth in a narrow band. Export-control conformity, continuing-airworthiness data, capacity modelling in a certified environment. These are not general consulting skills. They are a handful of people in any organisation, already committed to something else.
Time-to-team. Staffing a specialist cell inside a large operating model takes months of internal sourcing. A small senior team is on the problem in weeks, with no ramp.
Where we fit
We work inside Capgemini-led mandates, to their governance and their client’s release process, not alongside them on a parallel track.
The two operating models are genuinely complementary rather than rhetorically so. A global consultancy is built for scale, assurance and standing behind an outcome at industrial volume. A boutique is built for a small senior team going deep on a well-defined problem and being answerable for the answer. Aerospace engagements routinely need both, and the combination holds because neither is pretending to be the other.
What we bring to that arrangement is the same thing we bring anywhere: reconstructing what is actually true from records that disagree, and making the answer survive being questioned: by the prime, by the end client, and by an auditor.