A Holistic Approach to Manufacturing System Design in the Defense Aerospace Industry

Manufacturing has evolved to become a critical element of the competitive skill set of defense aerospace firms. Given the changes in the acquisition environment and culture; traditional thrown over the wall means of developing and manufacturing products are insufficient. Instead, the development and manufacture of air and spacecraft require much more interaction between the various functions. Also, manufacturing systems are complex systems that need to be carefully designed in a holistic manner and there are shortcomings with available tools and methods to assist in the design of these systems. This thesis proposes and validates a framework to guide the manufacturing system design process. The exploration and validation activities used 14 case studies from major aerostructures, electronics, launch vehicles and spacecraft. Actual manufacturing system design processes were observed real-time or captured retrospectively. An evaluation tool was used to compare the actual manufacturing system design processes with the process proposed by the framework. This degree of congruence with the framework was then compared to a metric of actual/planned performance of the manufacturing system. The results of the framework congruence versus the actual/planned performance metric showed that the case studies that were able to meet their planned performance also had manufacturing system design processes that resembled the process proposed in the framework. But the results also illustrated the different traits between the cases that were able to meet their planned performance and those that were not. Looking at the commonalities between the cases in the groups led to the discovery of the determinants of superior performance: breadth of functional interaction through the design process, use of a manufacturing strategy, the status of the manufacturing function, customer involvement, co-location and an enterprise perspective.