Original Date: 02/19/2007
Revision Date: / /

Raytheon’s Network Centric Systems Manufacturing Center in Largo, Florida, developed troubleshooting guides to capture the knowledge and experience of the design engineer for use by manufacturing and test personnel. The information contained in the guides provides detailed information that serves as a source of documentation for manufacturing to use in determining possible causes of failures.

Raytheon’s Network Centric Systems (NCS) Manufacturing Center in Largo, Florida, previously had no formal or documented process for transferring knowledge from design engineers to manufacturing personnel. When a program transitioned to manufacturing, design engineers were reassigned to new programs. Lessons learned by design engineers were not being communicated to manufacturing, and no detailed documentation existed that explained the circuit and module operation.

Raytheon NCS now prepares troubleshooting guides to transfer the knowledge from design to manufacturing. The guides are prepared by subject matter experts (SMEs) and provide the theory of operation at the module level, including a detailed description of circuit operations and key components, and simplified schematics to aid in troubleshooting specific sections of the circuitry. Troubleshooting notes are also included that explain possible causes of test failure based on the knowledge and experience of the design engineers.

Raytheon Largo’s troubleshooting guides are evolving into interactive guides based on hyperlinked word documents. Each step in the test sequence has a brief description of the test and the most likely causes of failure. By “control clicking” on the particular test in the document that failed, the most likely causes of failure are displayed. To date the interactive guide has been produced for only the Multi-Band/Multi-Mode Radio Synthesizer, with interactive guides planned for other products.

The development of the troubleshooting guides ensures that the knowledge of design engineers is transferred to manufacturing. This has accelerated the learning curve for troubleshooters at the manufacturing site who can refer to the guide to troubleshoot problems more efficiently and effectively based on documented lessons learned and detailed by the SMEs in the guides.

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