Tracking space-bound materials for earth assembly
Lockheed Martin's homegrown materials tracking system reduces labor costs and cycle times in building space satellites and missiles.
By Tom Feare -- Modern Materials Handling, 5/1/1999
Out in earth orbit and in deep space, products made by Lockheed Martin Missiles & Space (LMMS) are tracked quite accurately. Very sophisticated computer hardware and software keep up precisely with the whereabouts of communication satellites, for example.After a four-year, $10 million project, Lockheed's earthbound assembly operations now have their own new system to track and monitor materials for manufacturing. This system is proving to be a labor saving and time saving hardware/software tool as well as providing other benefits to LMMS management. Initial results are encouraging.
Real-time monitoring is no less vital on earth than in space. Materials, parts, and other components will go into assembly of the company's widely varied mix of products. Yet, whether it's a satellite or missile, remote sensing device or Hubble Space Telescope, all Lockheed products have some key factors in common: the high-quality, high-reliability demands of operation under conditions in space.
Lockheed's advanced real-time material system - or ARMS for short - is a third-generation materials tracking system for the company's Sunnyvale, Calif., manufacturing campus. It's also been developed for rollout to some LMMS remote assembly sites.
ARMS is homegrown, explains project manager Kevin McWeeney. A development team of software engineers and other specialists, led by McWeeney, built the system around off-the-shelf hardware and then wrote customized software for it (see system architecture graphic, this page).
The system is perhaps better described as a materials tracking and handling system. It performs tracking activities, and ties into automatic data capture and identification technologies such as bar code scanners and printers, to do so. But ARMS also carries out a number of materials management activities much like a warehouse management system does. For example, in receiving it takes care of purchase order and parcel receipt functions along with payment initialization. Material investigation and inspection testing functions are also programmed into the software's suite of receiving activities.
Among its stores or storeroom functions, ARMS oversees stocking, kitting, and disbursing activities. It takes tracking materials up to the shop order pre-release stage. At this point, other systems manage assembly.
At several sites it's tied into automated systems, including one that has a 2-tier, 24-pod horizontal carousel subsystem for staging parts in totes (see photo and sidebar). There's also an in-transit tracking capability (see graphic).
Modern Materials Handling first reported on the first-generation materials management system project in Sunnyvale in an April 1990 cover story.
Reducing labor, cycle times
When project planning began in 1993 to update prior materials tracking systems, says Kris Forbes, software engineer, Lockheed was facing a number of challenges:
- Reductions in federal government contracts.
- Difficulty in responding to and servicing commercial business.
- Problems working with an array of legacy software systems.
- Increased overhead.
The vision behind ARMS, says Robin Lee, the project's executive sponsor, was to consolidate systems and systems support throughout LMMS. Seven legacy systems were to be replaced with a single materials tracking system. Goals for ARMS to achieve included reducing labor costs and cycle times in receiving, stocking, disbursing, kitting, and other operations. Redundant processes were to be eliminated.
"We also had to stop moving so much paper around," adds McWeeney. Hardcopy documents - such as receiving memos and material requests - had to become history under a new system.
Unnecessary costs - such as $750,000 spent in one documented instance on materials lost or time wasted trying to find them - had to be avoided. "Touch" labor, as much as possible, had to be cut out.
Benefits so far
Thus far, McWeeney's team has rolled ARMS out to two automated receiving/staging activities and to 3 non-automated operations in Sunnyvale and to four offsite facilities. Results are impressive, says McWeeney.
ARMS' return-on-investment figures include a 30% labor savings in parts receiving at one unit and a 20% improvement in cycle time for this sub-process. While headcount remains the same for parts disbursing in the unit, cycle time for this activity is reduced 30%, for an improvement, he adds.
Data gathering for program management shows a 50% labor savings in this same unit, while cycle time for this activity has fallen, for an 100% improvement.
ARMS tracks, to the level of minute detail, receiving location moves, which employee performed a specific transaction, and all other stores activity, says McWeeney. Thus, it gives management better tools to analyze and deal with material shortages and problems and to be proactive, rather than reactive.
Error reduction and improved data integrity are "huge benefits," adds Lisa Cornelius, software engineer. Moreover, "now everyone speaks the same language and uses identical terminology under the new system," she adds.
ARMS also gives Lockheed enhanced capabilities to batch kit shop orders, she says. And the system readily and simply allows one to allocate/deallocate specific parts - which enables a LMMS operation to fill hot items from parts already reserved for another job.
With features from flexible computer integrated manufacturing designed into ARMS, says Mark Skovmand, corporate automation specialist, each work effort is an application which "bolts onto" the system. Interfaces similarly bolt on.
ARMS also supports both "push" and "pull" just-in-time practices, Skovmand explains. Transaction requests can be pushed into the system - even from other systems - in real-time. Transactions also can be pulled into work-in-process queues managed by their specific status requirements, personnel profiles, and locations in real time.
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