New Design and Manufacturing Processes Save Navy $2 Million

Challenge

Overcome the Aegis driver cabinet's quality issues, stemming from welding problems, that resulted in missed contract deliveries and cost overruns

Solution

Team with the customer and apply Raytheon Six Sigma™ principles to:

Eliminate the welding process and use a bolted cabinet design
Perform the Shock Qualification using the bolted cabinet populated with dynamic, mass models instead of production hardware to save time and money
Apply the Theory of Constraints to meet a demanding schedule of eight months for design, prototype and qualification
Apply modeling principles and best practices to minimize manufacturing costs and ensure that a successful prototype could be built in ten weeks

Results

Forty-eight percent cost reduction
Nearly $2 million flow-through savings to U.S. Navy customer
$3 million net savings expected from follow-on projects
Eliminated all welds and reduced part count from 135 to 14
Through savings and enhanced performance, relationship with Navy customer was greatly enhanced

Art vs. Science

Welding is more art than science; it relies on skilled operators with years of training. In addition, inspections are performed using the human eye, and the errors (weld cracks) may not appear until hours or days after the process is completed. Delays associated with weld defects on the Aegis driver cabinet caused Raytheon to miss contract deliveries to the U.S. Navy. As a result, Raytheon needed to find a new way to manufacture Aegis driver cabinets.

In order to eliminate the root cause of the problem, the Raytheon team devised a bolted-cabinet design that did away with welding altogether. The design had the advantages of both eliminating the identified cause of failure and reducing cycle time and cost. The Navy Program Executive Office (PEO) approved the plan, committing over $1.3 million to support the new design.

Gaining Commitment and Ranking Customer Preferences

As the Raytheon team, composed of the engineering, quality, program office and manufacturing functions, communicated the goals of the project to the Navy customer, it learned that many influential stakeholders did not, in fact, support the project. Having just completed qualifying the welded cabinet’s recent upgrades, these parties did not feel it would be prudent to go through another qualifying process again. In order to satisfy these stakeholders, the Raytheon team applied Voice of the Customer and Stakeholder Analysis tools. Raytheon then assembled a team including people from the Navy PEO, engineering, quality, shipyard and qualification communities. In this way, the customer was actively engaged in the formulation of the solution and had a stake in its success.

The joint Raytheon / customer team forged the new design requirements by performing a Quality Function Deployment, a Six Sigma tool that is used to rank customer preferences. This tool helped the team determine which initial requirements were firm, which were secondary and which were not, in fact, required.

Making Improvements

Timing was critical on the project: missing the FY2003 production window would eliminate 50 percent of the projected savings because the FY2003 build was for double the normal quantity of cabinets. Thus, the team made execution to schedule a top priority.

The team searched for ways to streamline the process. Applying the Theory of Constraints was essential to meeting the demanding schedule of just eight months for design, prototype and qualification. One innovative solution involved performing the Shock Qualification using the bolted cabinet populated with dynamic, mass models instead of production hardware to save time and money. Another tactic involved applying modeling principles to minimize manufacturing costs and ensure that a successful prototype could be built in nine weeks.

Results

The Navy customer ultimately approved the design’s qualification and released it for production. In addition, the customer granted production approval for two more cabinets that are being designed without prototype and qualification builds, validating the process that the joint Raytheon-customer team developed. From follow-on projects, there is an expected net savings of $3 million. There have been notable “manufacturability” benefits: all welds have been eliminated and the part count has been reduced from 135 to 14. Finally, Six Sigma methodologies were used to successfully improve Raytheon performance to meet customer deliverables while boosting the customer relationship.