Targeting barriers
Raytheon Missile Systems 
destroys walls that hinder 
plant and personal growth


by Paul V. Arnold


Drive along the surrounding roads, past the desert cacti and scrub brush, and your eyes catch the tall fences capped with gleaming razor wire.

Pull up to the visitors' entrance, behind cars with U.S. government license plates, and say hello to the burly sentry who guards access.

Walk into any of the company's 24 manufacturing buildings with your employee escort and feel like a rat in a maze.  The view from the corridors?  Walls to the left, walls to the right.  Doors to production areas are locked and colored tape covers windows.

Pass through electronic gates, turnstiles and another sentry to walk in and out of various sectors of the 3 million square foot site.

If you think Raytheon Missile Systems is full of barriers today, you should have seen the Tucson, Ariz., facility a few years ago.

Barriers to greatness
Raytheon Missile Systems, a division of Raytheon Company (No. 70 on the Fortune 500 list), is the country's largest manufacturer of precision-electronic tactical missiles.  The Tucson site designs, builds and ships 14 different products, including the Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM), Tomahawk, Stinger, Sidewinder, Standard, Rolling Airframe Missile (RAM) and the Tube-Launched Optically Tracked Wire-Guided missile (TOW).

Besides the U.S. Navy, Air Force and Army, the company's customers include 44 foreign governments.

With that product line and clientele, barriers (i.e. security measures) are essential.

But the Tucson plant had plenty of barriers inside those top-secret manufacturing areas:
* Physical barriers stood in the way of manufacturing flexibility, productivity and teamwork.
* Psychological barriers formed between the more than 10,000 salaried and hourly employees, and between the former employees of companies that merged into Raytheon Missile Systems.
* And, occupational barriers limited employee satisfaction, mobility and growth.

Raytheon Missile Systems brought its internal walls down.  Here are the battle plans that triggered its success on the manufacturing, employee relations and career enrichment fronts.

A road map to total plant improvement
Are you one of those drivers who has no clue where they're going, but keeps on driving?   Why do many of us do this?  Because we're afraid to ask for directions.   Or, we don't consider ourselves "lost."  Or, we don't care that we're lost.  (It's the scenic route, part of the trip.)  That scenario is all too common in
industrial plants.

Managers and operators too often accept what they're given and fail to ask, "Why are we doing it this way?"  Speaking up and inciting change is risky.

A production area will be visually and overtly flawed.  A production line will be riddled with barriers.  But most decide to live with the lot they're dealt, will remain lost, instead of either stopping for directions, or pulling out a map and finding a better route.

Ruth Jacobson, principal manufacturing engineer in Raytheon Missile Systems' AMRAAM factory, has a map.  Two, to be exact.  One shows her area's production process prior to 1997.  The other shows the way things work today.  Side by side, they look like a set of before-and-after diet pictures.

"This was the original flow," she says, shaking her head.  "There were so many walls in here, areas were totally separated.  There was a stores area that had walls around it.  We had a walled area where we were doing our guidance section.   The people in the transmitter area had to go through two doors, go through another keyed, locked door, to enter another area.  To get back, they did it all over again."

AMRAAM looked more like a condominium complex than a production center.

"We didn't intend it to be that way," Jacobson says.  "Some of it was the result of so many movements through the years.  We shrunk areas of production.   We'd add one process, but drop two or three.  And because everything was so stationary, we were left with these blank spots in the middle.  So we filled them with other areas and tried to keep them separate.  The result was a disjointed factory."

If you followed an AMRAAM missile from raw components to finished product during the barrier-filled years, you'd walk six miles.  Today, it takes less than half that distance.  And the map outlining the production process shows clean lines, smooth flows and logical progression.  What happened?  Agile manufacturing.

Agility drills
Raytheon Missile Systems embraced the agile plant improvement methodology in October 1995 and over the past
4 1/2 years has injected it into the facility's production centers.

Adapted from the General Motors-Toyota Competitive Manufacturing Principles, it's goal is to improve quality, cost, responsiveness and customer satisfaction by eliminating waste and by involving all employees.

RMS armed the agile weapon with 16 bullets (see sidebar below).  A seven-phase, 45-step, 395-substep process drives a project from start (appraisal, preparation and analysis) to mid-point (planning and execution) to finish (integration and performance). 

Agile came to Jacobson's area in late 1997.

After supervisors and core team members (hand-picked salary and hourly workers) accepted and learned the battle plan from agile manufacturing instructors such as Jim Serazio and Jim Varboncoeur, they helped preach and teach the message to co-workers.

Then, as the battle began, representatives from every AMRAAM discipline (engineers, operators, production control, material control) came together and put the old process under the microscope.  Everyone's opinions and ideas were heard.  Then, the group began to remap the process.

They built production areas in a logical sequence.  They systematically arranged processes that had been dropped into holes.  They shifted unrelated processes to one end of the factory or removed them completely.  The changes were drastic.

"Nearly every piece of equipment, every work bench, everything was relocated," says Jacobson.

Walls weren't relocated.  They were obliterated, creating a physically and mentally open environment.

"The boundaries were erased," she says.  "With no walls, there's more communication between teams.  They can see what each other is doing.  There is not as much isolation, not as much 'my team' and 'your team.'"

AMRAAM and other model factories such as Stinger and TOW use agile devices such as overhead utility grids, flexible work cells, parts presentation carts and products that work like Tinker Toys.

A truly mobile home
Many plants stick with a flawed or doomed floor layout because the job of moving heavy machines and overloaded workstations, cabinets and tables is gargantuan.

On top of that, many are restricted by poles and floor units that hold the area's electricity, telephone and computer cords and cables, as well as air power and vacuum hoses.  They must either work around this hard wiring or move it at great cost.

Add it up and you have a project involving a host of personnel (production managers and employees, electricians, engineers, maintenance employees and contractors) and anywhere from a few days to a few weeks.

Installing overhead utility grids and wheeled work structures create a level of flexibility previously only dreamed of.

"From floor to ceiling, we're configured to meet the needs of today and tomorrow," says Stinger production manager Tom Stamps.  "Literally everything in here is on wheels, except for things that positively can't (flammable cabinets, solder machines and large test fixtures).  In nearly all cases, the mobile items are arranged in the middle and the monuments (stationary items) are on the edges.   The overhead grid frees up the floor.  You can still see where the poles used to be.  Envision those standing and you'll get an idea of how much dead space was in here."

Poles weren't the only problem.  Overflowing workstations, cabinets and toolboxes crowded the aisles.

Workplace organization teamed with the mobile concepts to reduce Stinger's production square footage by more than 50 percent.

"We shrunk our production area, but it's not crowded at all," says Stamps.   "We built a special engineering room and a circuit card assembly area in the back with the amount of space we freed up."

Stinger cleaned house.

"We wanted to get rid of as much 'stuff' as possible, take it off the
workstation, so they would have a better place to work," he says.
"Everything is in bins above them.  There's a bin for everything and everything is in a bin.  We cleared out and organized drawers.  Now, we have a specially designed drawer for tools.  In the past, everyone had a toolbox or just dumped their tools in a drawer.  We installed a foam liner in the drawer with holes for specific tools.  We wanted to make it almost surgical, designed for your job and needs.   So, the first tool you pick up is this, then this.  It's all in order of use.   If you don't use a particular tool, it doesn't belong in there."

The surgical theme also is used for mobile point-of-use parts presentation carts,which house fasteners and other MRO materials.

"Would you want the surgeon who's operating on you running to the next building to get something required for the job?" says Varboncoeur.  "We want to have everything that's needed at hand."

Every bin on carts and in workstations includes minimum/maximum level pull cards.   When items in a bin reach a predetermined level, the operator pulls the card and sticks it in a box.  A roving materials person picks up cards several times a day and fills orders.  Thus, the operator never has to leave the work area to search.

Some of the presentation carts, and many other mobile units (work benches, transportation carts, storage racks) are made of Creform -- plastic-coated, steel piping that's reusable, easily reconfigured and relatively inexpensive.

"It's like Tinker Toys," says Serazio.  "If you build something and it's not quite right, you just take it apart and modify it."

More than 50 percent of the plant's Creform structures have been reused, and the material itself is 95 percent reusable.

When a production employee requires a Creform product, he or she creates a sketch of the work bench, cart, etc.  This includes dimensions and whether additional hardware is needed (extra large wheels, glides for sliding shelves, bearings for rotating tops).

The employee gives the sketch to a maintenance mechanic, the two discuss any design difficulties and the mechanic builds it.

"Ever heard the term 'monument?'" says mechanic John Mendoza.  "When a craftsperson builds something, they build it to last 1,000 years.  They get real elaborate, use stainless steel.  It's a monument to their work.  You don't really need that.  What if the person didn't like it, or that person's needs changed, or there was a better way to do it?  You're stuck with all this material and the original idea.  Creform makes a lot of sense."

Just how mobile is mobile?
How does mobility eliminate current and future barriers?  TOW production planning/material leadperson John Roeder discarded a lengthy conveyor belt when that area went to wheels.

"An assembly line is great when you're doing 100 missiles a day and everyone on the line is focused on a single operation," he says.  "But we're doing half that and our people are doing multiple tasks."

Doing multiple tasks on an assembly line created large amounts of work in progress (WIP).

"You used to have 36 operations," says Mendoza, who serviced the conveyor on many occasions.  "One person would do two operations, the next would do three, and as you went on, you'd have 60 pieces in WIP, incomplete."

Now, TOW's work in progress is practically non-existent.

"Getting rid of the belt also made the factory a better place to work," says Roeder.  "It was noisy and dirty, a real pain."

Mobility also released TOW from being shackled to a floor layout.

"In the original factory, the rework area was in an enclosed back room at the far end," says Roeder.  "We knocked down the walls, reduced floor space 75 percent and brought that area out on the floor, where we thought it would best serve our needs.  After two months in this setup, we came up with a better place for it.   We switched the rework area with the supervisors' area.  We completed the move in eight hours."

The Stinger factory offers similar success stories.  The first outlines the final stages of the area's redesign in 1997.

"We needed to be able to run the first day back from Christmas vacation," says Stamps.  "So (product control specialist) Pat Carter, I and a few others came in on a Saturday.  We had to stage all the hardware, make sure everything was lined up where we wanted it.  Well, Pat noticed a major flaw in the setup and showed us how it would impact production.  We had to completely reconfigure."

The small group simply unplugged everything, created a more optimal setup, locked the wheels in place and plugged back in.  Total redo time: seven hours.

Several months later, Carter sought to slightly expand her stockroom area.  She asked Stamps to move a row of production workstations over 3 feet.  In less than 15 minutes, a crew rolled the benches and created the required space.

Moving to maintenance
Agile provided a facelift to all of Raytheon Missile Systems' production operations.   But it didn't stop there.  In the past year, the concepts have spread to production support areas such as maintenance and engineering.

Maintenance shops that had become fortresses (walled in by cabinets, tool chests, etc.) were turned into highly mobile, organized response centers.

Maintenance storerooms that looked as organized as a "Where's Waldo?" book are now uncluttered.  The obsolete junk is gone, as are the cardboard boxes that housed items.  The remainder is neatly organized, most in labeled, plastic storage units.

But the crowning achievement centers around preventive maintenance.

"Most maintenance tasks should be preventive maintenance.  That's what buys you the most in the long run," says maintenance program administrator Ed Marsh.   "We went in and verified all the equipment in the focus areas (sections of three factories), made sure all that equipment had PMs, then leveled the PM schedule.   So instead of all the PMs coming out at the first of the month, they were level-loaded over the course of the month.  They are planned and scheduled."

And must be completed, final paperwork and all, on time.

Prior to agile, around 15 percent of PMs were done on time.  Six weeks later, the focus area was 100 percent on-time.  The project is working its way through the entire facility, and overall on-time PMs are currently at about 30 percent.

From 'us vs. them' to 'we are family'
Walls, conveyor belts and clutter were visible barriers for RMS employees.  But to many, so were the identification badges they wore on their shirt or around their neck.   Salary employee badges were brown.  Hourly employee badges were green.   Why the difference?

"Nobody knows.  We were never told why there had to be a difference," says Stinger employee Debbie Matlock.

Different colors unintentionally created an us vs. them atmosphere.

"People became known as 'brown-badgers' or 'green-badgers,'" she says.   "If you had a green badge, you were looked down upon.  Or, you'd walk down the hall and tell a friend, 'That guy is such a brown-badger.'"

The badges were eventually changed, but in January 1996, RMS' leaders acknowledged that strong cultural barriers still existed and empowerment wasn't the norm.

"They realized these were the reasons we weren't progressing as fast as we could," says Serazio.

Top plant management enacted changes to help create a more cohesive populace and an environment that downplayed job status.

Hourly employees joined salary workers on brainstorming, planning and troubleshooting teams.  This teamwork was essential in spreading the concept of agile manufacturing, and is crucial today as the plant embarks upon a Six Sigma program.

Hourly workers are asked for their opinions, and managers listen.  With this open dialogue, hourly workers trust salary workers more.

"We put all of our ideas together and make it work," says Stinger employee Sheila Grosart.  "Teamwork is important.  You need to be a family.   Heck, you spend as much time with the people in the plant as you do at home with your own family."

CEP helps employees be all they want to be
Prior to 1987, the Tucson plant, then known as Hughes Missile Systems, offered employees jobs.  Simply put, if you were hired as a custodian, you might someday advance to be a maintenance mechanic, but if you really wanted to be an assembly test specialist or a metal fabrication worker, your chances were slim to none.

"You couldn't move around the company," says former maintenance manager Cal McNutt.  "If you didn't have documented experience in that area, you were pretty much locked out.  You were locked into the occupation you were in.  You had no ability to compete for a job outside your current occupation."

So when missile products were eliminated or moved to other company plants, or when the defense industry faced rocky financial periods, you were powerless to layoffs or termination.

In 1987, the company and the International Association of Machinists & Aerospace Workers union developed the Career Enrichment Program to address employees' aspirations and fears.

CEP is a pay-for-knowledge plan that enables hourly workers to obtain certifications for particular job units by completing prescribed courses at a local community college.   An employee generally takes seven to 10 semester-long classes to be certified for a job unit.  When an employee attains a certification, his or her pay is immediately changed to reflect the pay of a person with that job skill.  The employee can then apply for jobs requiring that qualification.

In addition, CEP addresses bargaining unit employee participation, career development, compensation and labor utilization.

CEP is run by a board made up of representatives from management (McNutt is one member) and representatives from the bargaining unit.  Bargaining unit members serve four-year appointed terms, and receive a leave of absence from their normal job to serve CEP on a 40-hour-per-week basis.

Representatives come from the five "family" job classifications (assembly, fabrication, maintenance, process and support).  They design classes and certification challenge tests, develop unit descriptions, and utilize hourly employees as CEP instructors and subject matter pros.

Since CEP's implementation, the plant has enhanced its job environment and significantly improved its labor utilization and flexibility.  Occupation categories were reduced from 132 to 53.  More than 400 salary tasks are now assigned to hourly employees, which reduced task duplication and costs.

In addition, the number of certifications held by employees increased (more than 70 percent of union employees hold rights to two job units, and more than 50 percent hold rights to three or more), thereby elevating employee skill levels and flexibility, and making them less vulnerable to job reductions.

It effectively leveled barriers to personal and career goals.

"You can be what you want to be.  It's better than the Army," says Jack Terry, a committee member and machinist by trade.

Committee member Mickey Raper (assembly) tells of an employee hired as a custodian.

"The guy didn't do well in high school, but he got a job here," says Raper.   "He saw an opportunity to improve himself through CEP.  He took a full course load last year and got the utility helper unit.  Now, he's going for manufacturing specialist and his goal after that is to be a production technician."

Adds Terry: "Now he has a career path, and a life."

By eliminating manufacturing, employee and occupational barriers, the Raytheon plant is able to meet the challenges that lie ahead.

To learn more about Raytheon, visit www.raytheon.com.

This article appeared in the April/May 2000 issue of MRO Today magazine.  Copyright, 2000.

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