Virtual Integration for Large Systems

Modeling and simulation are playing a central role in transforming the C3 Networks group of The Boeing Company's Integrated Defense Systems division (IDS) from a vertically integrated manufacturer to large-scale systems integration business (LSI); this means that the IDS is being transformed into an engineering operation with almost no manufacturing. This has led to a fundamental shift in the role of modeling and simulation. From planning smooth production flows, the emphasis has moved to preventing last-minute surprises. And it is working. Engineers at the Boeing IDS C3 Networks group in Anaheim, CA, say preventing surprises has saved millions of dollars and has reduced cycle times by as much as half.

Boeing engineers rely on simulation to ensure that engineers' designs can, indeed, be manufactured and also that these ideas validate suppliers' and partners' manufacturing plans, which are tightly linked to the designs. Those links are then used to manage the virtual organization.

To predict where problems might occur, engineers use Digital Process for Manufacturing (DPM) from DELMIA (Auburn Hills, MI). DELMIA is the digital manufacturing brand used by Dassault Systèmes, a software company located in Suresnes, France.

In recent years, Boeing Anaheim has become a kingpin among military and aerospace electronics firms by forming ad hoc teams to bid, engineer, build, test and deliver network driven systems, advanced information and missile defense systems. Each system component (rarely larger than a one-meter cube) is crammed with high-reliability electronic and electromechanical systems. Many are for onboard guidance and control systems for missiles and their payloads1and electronic countermeasures; others are for naval and aircraft navigation.

In the network centric systems arena, change and innovation never cease and new military and commercial programs emerge monthly. That puts a premium on fast-moving engineering and production management organizations that can form teams of business partners from an ever-evolving cast of subcontractors. As a prime contractor, Boeing manages these teams as virtual companies, the most effective business approach anyone has yet found to meet customer demands for on-time, under-budget deliveries.

Before Boeing

Until the 1997 acquisition by Boeing, the Anaheim complex was Rockwell International Corp.'s Autonetics Division, a self-contained electronics factory with one million-plus square feet of production space. Since then, changes have been enormous.2 "We have evolved into developers, laboratories and prototypers, a vital resource for manufacturing partners and suppliers," said Herman Tse, manager of the Boeing Virtual Manufacturing Engineering Center (VMEC) at the Anaheim plant.

Other than for a few highly specialized things, in-house manufacturing at Anaheim is only for low-initial-rate production. Everything else is engineering and testing. "The goal for the [IDS] business unit is that we don't build anything," said Louis C. Alvarez, producibility lead for Virtual Manufacturing and lead engineer for simulations at Boeing Anaheim. "We integrate other people's shops."

"Simulation, and discrete event simulation in particular, lets us use the LSI business model to work effectively with all the suppliers and partners," Tse noted. This is the polar opposite of the vertical - physical - integration under Rockwell Autonetics. Integration remains central to all the business processes, but now it is virtual, rather than vertical and wide ranging rather than hemmed in by four walls.

VMEC engineers measure their simulation successes both in costs avoided, which they say is "many millions of dollars," and also by mitigating some of the many risks in aerospace systems business. This helps enable the business transformation to virtual from vertical, which is essential for survival in today's highly competitive world of defense contracting.

Challenge: Preventing Surprises on the Receiving Dock, or Anywhere Else

There is much more to Boeing Anaheim's challenges than engineering matters. VMEC engineers and Boeing IDS as a whole are still adapting to many upheavals that accompany the shift to virtual from vertical integration. Here are a few of the main challenges they have encountered and dealt with:

 

• The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) requires that likely competitors on big procurements share the upfront engineering burdens and develop competing prototypes - DoD (Boeing Anaheim's biggest customer) then picks the winning prime contractor based on the best design and best manufacturing plans. Separating engineering and manufacturing this way tends to boost the need for modeling and simulation.
  
• The shift from vertical to virtual has led to an end to assurances that winning the engineering portion of a big procurement guaranteed a production contract - Boeing must share information, once very tightly guarded, with rivals such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics. "We are constantly challenged by the contractual need to share our designs and engineering with our competitors," Tse noted. Simulating and analyzing these flows of information are proving very helpful.
  
• Program speed-ups with highly compressed engineering and delivery schedules.
  
• Lean manufacturing requirements to minimize inventories, especially work-in-process - even though Boeing Anaheim does very little real manufacturing, lean puts a premium on bulletproof production planning for what remains.
  
• An exponential increase in the need to handle in-process status information as the number of products multiplies.

   

All of these issues are what makes it so essential for Boeing to plan ahead so as to avoid all potential problems later on. "If one expects to navigate successfully through these business conditions," said Alvarez, "then modeling these scenarios from both information-exchange standpoints and organizational- modeling perspectives is a key requirement." He added, "If you couple this scenario with periodic calls to morph the engineering organizations, switch out the individual players, shuffle their roles and responsibilities, then I think you have a recipe for potential chaos. That is why in today's defense contracting environment, there is no room for error." E.R. ("Gene") Field, manufacturing engineer in Tse's group, summed it up: "We simply cannot afford discovery on the receiving dock, or any other surprise. By the time you actually can see a problem, it's too late."

Solution: Producibility Reviews, Discrete Event Simulations, Rhythm

New LSI programs come from DoD, the individual military services, other areas in IDS and other Boeing units as well as from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the airlines. "This makes concept development very important to success in our LSI business environment," Tse observed. Simulations convert and manage multiple CAD data sources while "supporting multiple sites whose hardware is continually being upgraded and reintegrated." Boeing focuses its DPM simulations on five applications:

 

1. Conceptualizing new products for new programs to determine their viability.
   
2. Verifying testing processes which, in systems integration, can be up to half the overall production effort.
   
3. Validating subassembly manufacture, final assembly and packaging to ensure producibility - usually the biggest engineering concern. Simulations link, manage and control product data management systems in "federated" architectures, i.e. dispersed among the suppliers and partners.
   
4. Managing the supplier/partner teams based on resources, inventory queues, potential bottlenecks and clashes between components, assembly fixtures and tooling. This requires modeling and simulating schedule interactions among suppliers and lead system integrators. The approach is based on resource constraints. A further complication is that LSI business models create pressure to push engineering and manufacturing risks downward to suppliers and outward to business partners.
   
5. Obtaining near real-time performance status in both product and process development, at all levels of the supply chain for weapons systems. "Providing the means to buffer the inevitable schedule adjustments and protect product deliveries across the whole supply chain is a constant challenge," Tse commented.

    

Boeing departs from the conventional use of simulations in the fourth and fifth points. In their simulations, VMEC engineers substitute business transactions such as design revisions, assembly completions and sign-offs for the usual CAD objects (components, fixtures, machinery etc.). Thus, the benefits of 3D solid modeling are combined with the Gantt charts that industrial engineers (IEs) have always used to analyze schedules for throughput, conflicts, constraints and disconnects.

As required by the DoD in large LSI programs, "We are putting together virtual companies," said Alvarez. "Because so many more business units are involved today, there are so many more gates to get through in getting a program running. Most of that is handled with producibility reviews built around DPM simulations."

He added, "We have to focus on the bigger picture in planning production-work centers and whole factories but not work cells. That's what is truly different from an engineering standpoint. Work cells are the concern of the partners and suppliers."

One aspect of managing these virtual companies is product data management that is "federated" equally among all the partners. Alvarez explained that "we want data like engineer sign-offs to go into our computer systems automatically. We don't want to have to fish for it in their systems and paperwork. Combined with a heavy emphasis on systems engineering, this gives us ways to maintain each program's 'rhythm,' the contractually required pace of task completions and unit outputs."

Field added, "It turns out you can use 3D discrete event simulation to model any process. There are queues, constraints, clashes and bottlenecks in program management and systems integration just as there are in software development or in actual, physical manufacturing. We just changed what is considered an event."

He continued, "Since we don't make very many [physical] things here anymore, we don't do much detailed process engineering either. Instead, we integrate the processes by which things are made."

The issue is not about the systems or tools the users have "but the processes they use and the skills of the people they assign," Field pointed out. "When we have the best of both, we can be pretty sure we will reach what we call a Level 5 success, which is unqualified success."

"The big issue to make all this happen is hardware integration from multiple vendors," said Tse, who has a manufacturing and operations background. "This is where simulation is invaluable."

Results: From Vertical to Virtual Integration

In the transition to Boeing IDS from Rockwell Autonetics, the meaning of "integrated" has completely changed. "The program manager now is the conductor of an orchestra," Alvarez observed, "and the score is the schedule and the budget."

Field also made comments on the issue as well: "Boeing Anaheim is still highly integrated but not in the traditional way with everything on site," he pointed out. "Now the integration is handled virtually, with simulation." In the Rockwell-to-Boeing transition he, Alvarez, Tse and others on the VMEC team have become systems engineers - even though they started their careers as IEs and mechanical engineers (MEs) on Autonetics production lines.

"We had to reinvent ourselves," recalled Gregory Chewe, former VMEC-Anaheim manager and also a Rockwell veteran. "Simulation and systems engineering gave the IEs and MEs the skills to do that. The team had to develop new skills so they could work comfortably in an LSI business environment. We had to learn to handle information from many different systems, deal with many different business cultures, interface to different hardware, and work with people from different business units" (see Trust and Telemetry: The Connectivity Challenges in Simulation sidebar). Early in 2006, Chewe was promoted and transferred to the Boeing Satellite Systems operations in nearby El Segundo.

Results from using DPM in a systems-engineering or network-centric mode, rather than just for traditional IE/ME tasks, includes balancing organizational agility with the need for formal, validated procedures - procedures that ensure each job gets done right the first time. "We are using DES simulation methods here to keep the IEs and MEs involved with new programs coming down the pipeline," Tse noted. "We are tying together the many intangibles of these programs," he added. "That means many of the processes are not linear, as they were in the old Autonetics days" where he, Chewe, Alvarez and Field were trained. "For us this was a big transition. We are still evolving, and we are continuously marketing these tools to the other IDS engineering units."

Benefit: A Radically New Way of Doing Business

Like all good engineers, Tse's VMEC team strives to add value through cost avoidance. His team is convinced their efforts save Boeing several hundred thousand dollars a year just in preventing errors not discovered until they get to the loading dock - when it is too late. Additional savings change could be far larger from better management of ad hoc partnerships and "virtual companies," reducing inventories (lean), and maintaining margins while coping with speed-ups and abrupt engineering changes. But these benefits are intangible.

Given the competitive nature of defense contracting and the strictures of the International Trade in Arms Regulations (ITAR), Boeing IDS-Anaheim achievements are often most usefully expressed as new capabilities rather than concrete successes, though those are many. Field pointed out that VMEC simulations are working so well for Boeing because they provide suppliers and partners with global sequences for moving large or heavy objects such as test consoles with bulky cabling and multiple test leads. On production lines, they often must share the same space with assembly fixtures. "We have captured programs with this capability even when the procurement is still in the conceptual phase." He added, "Simulations help prove that we have our act together as a bidder, that we eliminated any wasted effort, eliminated any potential for rework, made necessary process improvements, or enhanced the physical facilities. All these are big factors in cost avoidance," as well as for demonstrating readiness for DoD procurements.

The bottom line, as always: time is money. "Without simulation, cycle times would be up to twice as long," Tse pointed out. "In many programs, that time is just not available. Simulations let us make our project milestones, meet our business goals and achieve our departmental objectives - and they help us prove it. There are no limits to how we can and will apply simulation for cycle-time reduction, producibility and hardware integration."

For more information on Boeing Anaheim Production, contact Herman Tse, manager, Virtual Manufacturing Engineering Center, Boeing Integrated Defense Systems. For more information on DELMIA, the Digital Manufacturing Brand of Dassault Systemes, contact Marc Rakowski, marketing manager, North America or visit the Web site at >www.DELMIA.com

Notes

1. Missile-related products from Boeing include on-board navigation and command-and-control systems for payloads, boosters and kill vehicles (part of the space-based missile defense system). Boeing also makes equipment for testing, ground support and pre-deployment checkout.
   
2. Today Boeing uses only a few of the former complex's buildings. Many buildings now house other companies. The biggest structure, where missile guidance systems were once assembled, was sold and has been empty for many years. Since the acquisition, employment has fallen by about 80%.