Lockheed Martin Aeronautics tackles e-work instructions

Online access to product-related data is the cornerstone of the product life-cycle management (PLM) concept. But on the factory floor, sharing product data can boil down to something as tangible as having the correct work instructions in front of you.

Alan Vyce knows this need firsthand. He

is project manager of the Electronic Work Instruction Deployment Team at Fort Worth, Texas-based Lockheed Martin Aeronautics. Vyce and his team are deploying a system for electronic work instructions from Waltham, Mass.-based HMS Software at Lockheed Martin's aircraft plants in Texas, Georgia, and California.

The challenge, Vyce says, is that the company's old paper-based systems mandate associating supplemental documents that reflect product changes with existing documents spread throughout massive manufacturing areas. "Imagine that you have people who do nothing but staple these green cards to existing pieces of paper all over the factory floor, and imagine you have people out there who don't have totally configuration-controlled data," Vyce says. "They may be working off of instructions or blueprints that don't reflect the proper configurations."

Electronic work instructions, says Vyce, avoid this paper chase by putting the online instructions "as close to the work area as possible, and allowing [personnel] to interact with the system so they can view everything they need to make a high-quality product."

The HMS package addresses computer-aided process planning; shop-floor management (including electronic work instruction); and quality management. According to Alex Houtzeel, HMS's founder and president, the deployment at Lockheed Martin was complicated by the fact that the Texas and Georgia plants each had a mainframe-based legacy system for manufacturing tracking that was a crucial point of integration.

"One of the major challenges when we started this project a couple of years ago was not only installing our system, but in interfacing with all of the systems [Lockheed Martin] has," says Houtzeel. "There are about 70 different systems involving business as well as production."

Vyce estimates approximately 5,000 users throughout the Lockheed Martin plants will have access to PCs running the HMS system by the end of the year. Vyce declined giving specific ROI targets, but does say, "The percent reductions in inefficiencies won't be huge, but when you multiply it by hundreds of thousands of hours, those reductions yield some significant bottom-line savings."