Aviation Week Program Excellence Award NGC/IAL. Northrop Grumman Corporation F-35 Integrated Assembly Line

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1 I. Program Overview Aviation Week Program Excellence Award NGC/IAL Organization Name/Program Name: Program Leader Name/ Position/Contact information E- mail, Phone Program Category Program Background: What is this program all about? (No more than one page). Describe: The overarching need for this program History of the program The product that is created by this program Scope of work original & updated Expected deliverables Current status of the program Northrop Grumman Corporation F-35 Integrated Assembly Line Joel Treadwell Integrated Assembly Line Project Leader (661) o System level Production The F-35 Integrated Assembly Line (IAL) is an integrated, highly automated set of work cells developed to assemble efficiently, affordably and to demanding engineering tolerances the center fuselage for all three variants of the Dept of Defense s F-35 Lightning II aircraft. Conceived in 2005 to meet stringent cost, quality and production rate goals of the F-35 program, the IAL was opened in March 2011 at Northrop Grumman s Palmdale (Calif.) Aircraft Center of Excellence. It comprises automatic assembly tool systems, robotic manufacturing systems, and unmanned transportation systems, all controlled centrally and wirelessly by a factory communications system. The IAL occupies more than 200,000 square feet of factory floor space, and includes more than 700 tools required to operate 78 positions. Northrop Grumman developed the IAL in collaboration with Detroit-based KUKA Systems, an integrator of automated assembly lines for the automotive industry. It is the first assembly line in the aerospace industry to be conceived, designed and built as an integrated, fullyoptimized set of work cells working together efficiently from the start, not simply a collection of disparate islands of automation operating in the same location. The first center fuselage produced on the IAL was delivered to Lockheed Martin in March The line is currently producing center fuselages at the rate of one every five work days. The IAL is designed to be scaled up to produce center fuselages at the rate of one per day AVIATION WEEK PROGRAM EXCELLENCE INITIATIVE 1

2 II. VALUE CREATION = 20 POINTS Value: What is the value, competitive positioning, advantage, and return created by this program to your: Customers National interests, war fighter Company Strength, bottom line, and shareholders Scientific/technical value (particularly for R&D programs) Excellence and Uniqueness: What makes this program unique? Why should this program be awarded the Program Excellence Award? The IAL allows Northrop Grumman to produce a central structure of all three F-35 Lightning II variants on schedule, on budget with high quality and the high manufacturing tolerances demanded by a fifth generation military aircraft. This performance helps meet the stringent affordability, production rate and delivery goals of the F-35 program. The IAL gave Northrop Grumman the opportunity to acquire the latest technology-driven manufacturing practices using the skills and passions of its rising technology-savvy workforce. It also allowed the company to hone its skill as a high-volume, affordability-driven producer of advanced aircraft systems a track record that helps position the company for strong financial performance on current and future aircraft programs. The IAL is the first assembly line in the aerospace industry to be designed, built, and deployed as a single, integrated entity. It deserves a Program Excellence Award because it allows the nation to produce a next generation strike aircraft while meeting rigorous cost, quality, schedule and performance requirements. Its optimum combination of robotics, automation, and engineering tools deliver high-quality, high-precision aircraft assemblies at rates and costs that would be unattainable using manual assembly processes. III. ORGANIZATIONAL PROCESSES/BEST PRACTICES: (HOW DO YOU DO THINGS) = 30 POINTS Strategic: Affordability Management Describe how your program has addressed affordability from a solution, operational, business process, sustainment, strategic or other perspective. The IAL, whose development was funded by the F-35 program, was designed to take advantage of robotics and automation only where it produced significant improvements in speed, precision and affordability. We also adopted a commercial design, integration and procurement strategy: we integrated KUKA s expertise in creating high rate assembly lines with Northrop Grumman s expertise in producing high precision aircraft tooling. The result was a design, fabrication and installation concept that avoided $75 million in costs over conventional aerospace fabrication and integration techniques AVIATION WEEK PROGRAM EXCELLENCE INITIATIVE 2

3 Strategic: Opportunity Management - Describe how your program has identified its operational and business opportunity, and manages this opportunity throughout the program s life cycle. Strategic: Strategic Supply Chain Integration and Cost-effectiveness Management: - Describe how your program is integrating its supply chain to assure visibility and adapting long-term costeffectiveness up and down the supply chain. Strategic: Operational Integration and Systems Engineering Describe the challenges faced by your program in terms of integrating the system into its operational environment and its impact on systems engineering planning and management. Operational: Planning, Monitoring, and Controlling - Describe your planning and resource allocation processes. How do you monitor and review your program s progress and make corrections to keep the program on track? How have you worked with your customer to assure quality and communication without creating non-value reviews and audits that do not fit your program effort? The opportunity and motivation for the IAL was the F-35 program s need to produce high-precision aircraft at the rate of one aircraft per day within stringent cost, quality and engineering constraints. The line was designed to be modular so it could be scaled, cost-effectively in terms of size and capability, to meet any desired acquisition or production plan, up to one completed unit per day. The IAL was designed, from a cost and efficiency perspective, to integrate the engineering and production requirements of the F-35 center fuselage with the delivery requirements of our global supply chain (GSC). It takes into account variables such as kitting size, delivery schedule, size and delivery methods of different subassemblies, etc. We work closely with our GSC to ensure that F-35 parts are kitted and delivered to the factory floor on a schedule that s consistent with the current production rate of the IAL. Because the IAL was modeled after best practices of the automotive industry, it challenged traditional aerospace industry approaches to designing and integrating tooling systems. Where a typical aerospace project might have multiple subcontractors working side by side, each one independently managing their own statement of work, the IAL used a single project leader (general contractor) to manage the work of all subcontractors. This new approach met resistance at first from organizations used to exerting more control over their individual statements of work. With a single project leader, however, every subcontractor learned how to better support the integration and efficiency needs of the IAL. So managing cultural change was paramount to successful design and implementation of the IAL. The successful development of the IAL began with the development of a robust integrated master plan (IMP); i.e. a clear and comprehensive description of what would be done and how. The IMP includes descriptions of which organizations do what to implement the IAL, and the appropriate reviews to ensure that the project follows its agreed-upon development roadmap. We worked closely with our customer, Lockheed Martin Aeronautics, to ensure that our integrated master schedule (IMS) for the IAL an articulation of what happens when was consistent with the production requirements of the F-35 program AVIATION WEEK PROGRAM EXCELLENCE INITIATIVE 3

4 Operational: Supply Chain and Logistics Management -- What processes, tools and relationship-building methods have you used to develop, refine and improve supply chain and stakeholder integration? Please indicate methods used to analyze/fact-find regarding supplier proposals. This is one of the most critical needs of our industry please provide specific details and data that assisted you in gauging the effectiveness. Operational: System Integration, Testing & Reviews - Describe the activities and processes used to succeed in your system integration, and testing. How did you conduct system design and technical reviews? What innovations in processes or tools were used to further evolve this capability? Operational: Risk/Issue/ Opportunity Management - Describe the processes used to identify both risks and opportunity and to assure potential for both is addressed effectively. Please indicate any forward-leaning processes to support. We designed the IAL to reflect not only the engineering requirements of the center fuselage but also the kitting and delivery requirements of the parts and subassemblies required to build the aircraft. The IAL integrates parts delivery systems with assembly systems to ensure that parts can be received by Northrop Grumman and delivered seamlessly to the IAL to maintain the proper production schedule. The current line relies largely on manual delivery processes, but the containers used to kit and store parts on the IAL floor are sized to be compatible with transport by autonomous guided vehicles on the IAL floor in the future. Similarly, the IAL s command and control infrastructure contains provisions that will allow other GSC delivery processes to become more automated in the future. Northrop Grumman and KUKA adapted an automotive industry standard of designing, producing, integrating and testing a complete functional IAL at KUKA before it was disassembled, shipped and reinstalled at Northrop Grumman s F-35 assembly factory in Palmdale. This prototype IAL included all of the production, assembly, transportation, and command and control elements required on the final IAL. All IAL structures were preplumbed for IT, electrical wiring, conduits, etc., so they could be produced, tested and moved efficiently as modular pieces. During functional reviews, every organization affected by the IAL was required to review and approve every design iteration of the line. This integrated team testing and review process helped ensure that every aspect of IAL functionality and efficiency was surfaced, discussed and resolved before the line was installed or activated at Northrop Grumman. We identified specific areas of technical risk based on the maturity and commercial availability of parts or technologies needed to meet a given production requirement (e.g. the need for autonomous transportation vehicles to position themselves within.125 ). We assigned specific project leads to each area of risk, then monitored their performance. If we could not achieve the desired level of precision or performance, we would reassess/trade related technical, cost or schedule requirements to optimize the overall production plan. We worked hard to prevent pursuit of a single requirement from upsetting an otherwise smart, cost-effective process AVIATION WEEK PROGRAM EXCELLENCE INITIATIVE 4

5 Team Leadership: Team Culture and Motivation - Describe how you created your team spirit and culture, and accomplished entire team integration and individual team member motivation. Given the economic environment and changes in the global marketplace, how did you assure your team changed swiftly and with agility? Team Leadership: Lessons Learned and Knowledge Management - Describe how you collect lessons learned and best practices, and how they are shared with your team and company to improve performance. Also how are you capturing expertise and knowledge to assure availability over the life of the program? Team Leadership: Leadership Development - How do you develop your team s skills and prepare/ develop future leaders? We built the IAL project team around the idea of a single project lead managing multiple functions with a single budget, (versus a conventional model that would have had multiple functions working side by side managing their own budget and statement of work as co-leads). As the project leader, I worked to establish a singular focus on development and production of the integrated assembly line, with all functional leads and their teams contributing to that single goal. I encouraged the functional leads to take ownership in making the IAL an assembly process that had never been undertaken by the aerospace industry successful. I also encouraged the team to make use of best practices in the commercial manufacturing/assembly worlds by taking them on field trips to other assembly lines. Within the we context of the IAL, I gave my functional leads autonomy to bring their best ideas to bear on the success of the line. To this end, we were rewarded with active team engagement: many team members began working hours a day to make the IAL vision a reality. Before there was an IAL at Northrop Grumman, the company used a legacy F-35 system development and demonstration (SDD) assembly line to produce center fuselages. This SDD line provided an opportunity to develop some of the automated or robotic work cells that would become a central part of the IAL. The IAL team used a rigorous and disciplined lessons learned/recap process to capture and learn from lessons learned every day in the IAL development process. We taught the team that the recap process only works if every team member participates on a regular basis. The team used this lessons learned/recap process to develop many of the processes and procedures that now regulate the IAL. As project leader, I worked to identify the best leaders on the team, then gave them opportunities to grow their skills in different disciplines and different areas of leadership. We encouraged and provided opportunities for them to take classes in a variety of disciplines (IMS, management, budget control). I also exposed the team to the exemplary leadership techniques of leaders in other industries (e.g. Steve Jobs, former head of Apple, Elon Musk, head of Space-X), and encouraged them to never take no for answer, particularly if there is a better answer than no AVIATION WEEK PROGRAM EXCELLENCE INITIATIVE 5

6 Best (& Next) Practices: Identify your program s specific Best Practices that you believe are unique, and could be shared with others and become industry s Next Practices. The success behind the IAL stand-up was our rigorous, disciplined focus on the integrated project, coupled with follow-up and recap of every task assigned. Team members were trained to think of each task as a critical part of the whole: if they didn t execute their task, they would jeopardize the overall success of the project. IV. ADAPTING TO INNOVATION AND COMPLEXITY: (HOW DO YOU DEAL WITH YOUR PROGRAM S UNIQUE COMPLEXITIES) = 20 POINTS Identify the Program s Market Uncertainty level How new is your product to your market and users, based on the definitions below. Then describe how you deal and address this specific uncertainty: - Derivative an improvement of an existing product/system. - Platform a new generation in an existing product line. - New to the Market a product or system adopted from another market - Identify the Program s Technological Uncertainty using the definitions below. Then describe how you deal and address this uncertainty: - Low-tech: application of mature, well-established technology - Medium Technology: existing technology modified to meet new design requirements - High-Technology: recently developed new technology - Super High-Technology: non-existing technology that needs to be developed during the program. The Integrated Assembly Line (IAL), an adaptation of high volume automotive assembly line techniques, is New to the Aerospace Market. Unlike current aerospace assembly lines, which are typically islands of automation working in the same location, the IAL is a fully integrated system of robotic and automated work cells designed from the start to work together smoothly and efficiently. It is tasked, however, with producing much higher precision, higher tolerance assemblies (center fuselage of all three variants of the F-35 joint strike fighter), than the automotive industry typically produces. So Northrop Grumman engineers had to work closely with KUKA engineers to integrate high precision drilling and production tools into a high speed assembly line that would yield the affordability and production rates associated with mature, commercial automated assembly techniques. The IAL uses a variety of High Technology work cells and tools, including the Inlet Duct Robotic Drilling (IDRD) system, and a fleet of Automated Guided Vehicles (AGV). The IDRD has to drill holes precisely inside a serpentine, allcomposite inlet air duct, then countersink, clean up and verify the accuracy of the holes. The AGV has to pick up, transport and deliver tooling fixtures carrying precision assemblies to a precise (to within.125 ) location on the factory floor. The challenge is to assess the risks associated with each new technology, designate a leader to drive the maturation process, monitor each technology s progress toward achieving the production goals of the IAL, and have a back-up plan if the preferred technology doesn t mature fast enough to meet the IAL schedule. In most cases, the IAL technologies were mature, but not proven for the intended application. Successful maturation and integration of each technology is an iterative process. We have to identify and mitigate not only the obvious risks but also the less obvious unknown unknown risks AVIATION WEEK PROGRAM EXCELLENCE INITIATIVE 6

7 Identify the level of your System Complexity using the definitions below. Then explain how you are dealing with this level of complexity: - An Assembly performing a single function. - A Sub-system fitting within a larger system. - A System a collection of subsystems performing multiple functions. - An Array a System of Systems ; a widely dispersed collection of systems serving a common mission. Identify the Pace and Urgency of your team s effort using the definitions below. Then describe how you deal with the program s pace requirements: - Regular timing no specific time pressures. Fast/Competitive time to market is important for competitiveness. - Time Critical there is an absolute and critical-tosuccess deadline. - Blitz there is a crisis element driving the need for immediate response Other Complexities & Uncertainties - Describe other complexities and unknown factors faced by this program and how you addressed them. The IAL is best described as a System, but it is modular in structure. The tools used within the IAL range from simple (off-the-shelf) to complex. We dealt with the IAL complexity by developing, producing and testing every major work cell in its entirety at KUKA. We also developed and tested at KUKA the methodologies used to transport tooling and engineering assemblies between work cells. At KUKA, each cell went through factory acceptance testing. Then it was disassembled and transported to Northrop Grumman s F-35 facility in Palmdale, Calif., where it was reassembled as part of the IAL. In Palmdale, we performed integrated acceptance testing of each work cell. As we added more and more work cells to IAL, we added to its complexity, but the thorough testing at KUKA gave us the confidence in the functional integrity of the overall system. The pace and urgency of bringing the IAL online was time critical. We produced the first 68 F-35 center fuselages using a largely manual assembly line during the system development and demonstration (SDD) phase of the program. The SDD line, however, was not capable of producing center fuselages at the rates or with the first-time quality required to meet the production or unit cost goals of the F-35 program. Our start date of production on the IAL, March 1, 2011, was determined by the anticipated funding and production profiles of the F-35 program. To get there required a clear, articulate integrated master plan agreed on by all IAL stakeholders, and a clear, articulate integrated master schedule to ensure that everyone was marching to the same rhythm of program execution. Part of executing the integrated master schedule includes identifying the technical and political risks associated with meeting critical deadlines. Ultimately, risk drives the program s critical path, which drives the integrated master schedule. One of the most consistent long term uncertainties surrounding the IAL (in terms of customer expectations, requirements) has been the funding profile for the F-35 program, because it has a direct impact on the required rates of production and associated quality and affordability goals. We have addressed this uncertainty by making the IAL scalable and flexible modular in nature so that it s footprint and capabilities could be expanded (or not) consistent with the production needs of the program. This pay as you go approach helps prevent over capitalizing our production facilities so that we don t end up building a relatively small number of aircraft assemblies in a large, expensive facility AVIATION WEEK PROGRAM EXCELLENCE INITIATIVE 7

8 V. METRICS (HOW DO YOU MEASURE PROGRAM S PERFORMANCE) = 30 POINTS (Note: We are not looking for $ results, but the relative percentage achieved. In particular indicate what specific metrics and data you are using that drive the program beyond standard measures of schedule, budget, and performance, and which have contributed to your program s focus and its success.) Customer - How do you measure the impact of your program on your customer and your customer s satisfaction? Include a description of your metrics, as well as numerical evidence. Performance - How do you measure your program s performance in traditional terms such as schedule, budget, requirements, and business results? Preparing the Future - How do you measure and assess the long-term contribution of your program to the corporation/organization? We measure the impact of the IAL by comparing the percent of rework and overall cost/schedule required to produce a center fuselage on the IAL to the comparable numbers for producing a center fuselage on our former SDD line. When we produced our first center fuselage on the IAL, we realized a significant drop in rework and production time. Center fuselages produced on the IAL have continued to reflect these reduced levels of rework and production time. We measure (and ensure) the performance of the IAL by developing it with an integrated master plan (IMP). The IMP is underpinned by a detailed understanding and risk analysis of all the elements of automated high volume assembly that contribute to cost and schedule. Equipped with the confidence of how, we developed and use rigorously an integrated master schedule (IMS) to ensure adherence to the schedule, budget, etc. required to meet the quality, affordability and production rate goals of the F-35 program. The strong technical and financial performance enabled by the IAL, coupled with the leadership shown by Northrop Grumman in acquiring and adapting integrated automated assembly processes for the aerospace industry, positions the company to meet or exceed future F-35 production needs. With the production rate for the center fuselage forecast to grow by more than 100 percent in two years and 400 percent in four years, the IAL s efficiency and scalability ensure Northrop Grumman s position as a highly reliable, affordable producer of the most advanced 5 th generation fighter aircraft in the world AVIATION WEEK PROGRAM EXCELLENCE INITIATIVE 8

9 Team - How do you measure and assess the impact of your program on your team development and employee satisfaction? Unique Metrics - Describe any unique metrics you are using to measure your program s progress and how do you focus it for outstanding success. The impact of the IAL is best measured by the passion and dedication of the Northrop Grumman employees who joined the IAL project for the opportunity to bring alive a vision of integrated, high volume, high precision assembly for the aerospace industry. Given a chance to own and help revolutionize the aerospace industry s approach to automated assembly, our team members would typically work hours per day in pursuit of the IAL dream. To this day, we witness a certain esprit de corps among IAL team members because they know they have fundamentally altered the course of Northrop Grumman s future as a high volume producer of advanced aircraft. One of the most effective tools we developed and used regularly to stand-up the IAL was called our Day in the Life tool developed for each work center within the IAL. As part of bringing each work center online and integrating it into the IAL, we conducted a complete end-to-end execution of every operation performed by that work center from the tools it received, to the operation of every tool in that cell, to the completed assembly it produced. We included all internal and external customers and stakeholders including F-35 customers and our global supply chain in these comprehensive reviews of every work cell; our goal continues to be ensuring that all technical, logistical or affordability issues are identified and resolved. # # # 2014 AVIATION WEEK PROGRAM EXCELLENCE INITIATIVE 9