Original Date: 09/14/1998
Revision Date: 01/18/2007

The shrinking marketplace for military parts has begun impacting military contractors. As a result, contractors must turn to commercial parts to repair military products and/or continue production operations. The challenge is to accomplish this task without impacting the reliability or performance of military hardware. In January 1998, Raytheon Missile Systems Company (RMSC) implemented the Team of Teams approach to address issues that affect various Raytheon divisions. This approach uses multi-functional teams of experts from across RMSC.

RMSC used the Team of Teams approach to adapt commercial practices for designing and building military hardware with commercial components. First, the multi-functional teams identify those areas of the infrastructure being affected. For each area, a team reviews the existing knowledge and defines the common processes. These efforts are then integrated by higher-level teams to provide a coherent result. The key to the Team of Teams approach is to share common information throughout the company, thereby obtaining possible solutions and a final integrated result. The success of implementing commercial parts into Raytheon operations depends on the company’s ability to make all affected areas competent in the new process.

The Team of Teams approach promotes communications within the company, and provides access to a historically, untapped network of knowledge and leveraged resources. The continual interaction of these teams also leads to integrated processes that work coherently to produce a reliable product. Another example of the Team of Teams approach is the Raytheon Electronic Packaging Consortium, which is working together to solve electronic packaging issues.

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