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Original Date: 10/10/2005
Revision Date: / /
Best Practice : Lean Deployment
Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems uses a Lean Transformation Deployment process to move its Business Unit towards the company’s vision of operational excellence. This approach achieves a strict alignment of goals and objectives from the strategic level down to the operations level using a hierarchy of Oregon Producibility Matrix- based management metrics to drive requirements and expectations to the working level of the organization.
World-class organizations across the globe are implementing continuous improvement initiatives to maintain competitiveness and sustain and/or improve market share. Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems (IDS) relies on a continuous improvement system based on lean and Six Sigma principles to achieve its vision of operational excellence, with past successes that include quadrupled throughput, flow-time reductions of 60%, lead-time reductions of 70%, and increased inventory turns of 250%. The Raytheon IDS Integrated Air Defense Center (IADC) facility recently added recognition to its Continuous Improvement Program by winning the 2005 Northeast Shingo Prize for Excellence in application of Lean Six Sigma philosophies, with plans to apply for the National Shingo Prize in 2006. IADC’s success is based on a Lean Six Sigma deployment process that ties policy deployment-based strategic planning to operational level efforts through a robust metrics process supplemented by a Manufacturing Excellence Model (MEM) used to baseline performance and establish future improvement goals.
Raytheon IDS evolved from the acquisition and merger of Raytheon E Systems, TI Defense Systems, and Hughes Aircraft Corporation with the Raytheon Company. From the period 1999 to 2004, the Andover facility established its current identity and initiated a continuous improvement plan based on Six Sigma known as Raytheon Six Sigma™ (R6σ). This phase of the company’s evolution was marked by individual sub-organizational goals, value stream specific measures with little commonality across the company, limited effectiveness in employee involvement, and the lack of a common continuous improvement (CI) maturity index.
In 2004, a new deployment process based on integrated lean and Six Sigma objectives was initiated. This process identified four goals: World-class Performance, Connect Every Employee to the Business, Sustain Collaborative Partnerships with Company Teammates, and Increase Double-Digit Top- and Bottom-Line Growth. With strong leadership commitment, this plan was introduced by the IDS Operations Leadership Team in the 2004-2005 Strategic Goals. The basic elements of this deployment process include:
MEM, which uniformly evaluates and measures the maturity of CI growth in 20 elemental areas
The establishment of gap closure projects tied directly to strategic goals to define a road map to the desired future state
The execution of a continuous improvement cycle that identifies corporate strategic goals via a policy deployment matrix and maps these objectives to the working level through a robust metrics hierarchy based on Oregon Producibility Matrices. Metrics are broadcast real-time to the production floor, providing continuous feedback to the operations personnel on performance with respect to goals. At this level, specific CI initiatives are identified with the strategic objective they support to tie employee efforts to corporate goals.
Raytheon IDS has recently defined corporate goals with respect to customer Mission Assurance, which further solidifies employee ownership of customer care and satisfaction. By executing tailored deployment of Lean Six Sigma tools to IDS value streams, and continual use of the Manufacturing Excellence Model to evaluate growth, Raytheon IDS has established an enterprise-wide continuous improvement loop that aligns all levels of the organization to the same set of goals and objectives and positions the company to operate in the class of top performers in a highly competitive market.
Real-time metric dashboards display performance status against expectations and are visible to management and workers. The use of Lean Six Sigma tools to establish projects successfully have corrected undesirable performance and enabled the achievement of planned goals, resulting in an accelerated cash flow, added surge capability, and improved customer satisfaction.
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