Original Date: 10/10/2005
Revision Date: / /

The Raytheon Lean Office acts as a facilitator for change within Raytheon manufacturing and work center processes by supporting the need for change, vision, skill, and a plan that ensures the elimination of waste, communication to establish common goals, training execution, and obtaining employee and management buy-in to ensure sustainment of achieved improvements.

Raytheon Integrated Defense Systems (IDS) developed a Lean Office to provide local support for training in the transformation process facilitated by lean experts and internal focus areas and leads (Figure 2.5). Raytheon saw value in calibrating Raytheon to external experts for maintaining commonality in measures and keeping the processes aligned with larger Raytheon corporate goals. Using external experts is also an effective way of getting additional employee buy-in support, with local support from operations managers able to take ownership in the process with feedback from an external source. This enables operations managers to receive input for ideas in a “safe” environment without risk of reprimand.

The Lean Office facilitates policy deployment generation of flow-down activities and collaboration across work centers, establishment and timely execution of gap closure plans using internal subject matter experts (SMEs), and establishes measurements and goals. The Lean Office establishes overall Lean Deployment Strategy, sets Manufacturing Excellence Model (MEM) criteria, interfaces with accounting and financial organizations in Raytheon, and performs assessments of training needs and area performance to MEM criteria. This ensures alignment of policy deployment with Raytheon Cross Business Teams (CBTs) and their partners. Once training needs are established, the Lean Office carries out training requirements, ensuring employee participation in training that focuses on explaining the “why” of the IDS lean transformation. This helps to ensure that the progress and changes will stay as practice long after local projects to improve the process have been completed. Employees then see the value in IDS’ lean transformation and participate in decision making for projects (including the layout of their work areas), causing them to sustain the improvements in elimination of waste.

The Raytheon Lean Office acts as a facilitator for change within Raytheon manufacturing and work center processes through supporting the need for change, vision, skill, resources and a plan. Acting as a link between external lean experts and internal focus areas and work centers with those on the floor carrying out the operations and processes, the organizational design and the Lean Office ensure waste elimination, obtaining employee and management buy-in and commonality in goals through effective communication.

For more information see the Point of Contact for this survey.