Aerospace & Defense Case Study
United Defense
United Defense LP (UDLP) is a leader in the design, development and production of combat vehicles, artillery, naval guns, missile launchers and precision
munitions used by the U.S. Department of Defense and allies worldwide and America’s largest non-nuclear ship repair, modernization, overhaul and conversion
company. UDLP designs and builds all tracked vehicles for the U.S. armed forces, including the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. The Santa Clara facility houses
Engineering, Research & Development and Prototyping resources for this effort. UDLP employs 5,300 people with approximately 300 at their Northern
California site. UDLP’s corporate annual sales are in excess of $2 Billion.
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“CMTC’s committed expertise has resulted in a
huge savings and in United Defense achieving the
requirements of Boeing’s FCS program.”
George Nacu
GSD Engineering
Process Manager
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Issue/Needs
As a subcontractor to the Boeing Company on the Future Combat
System (FCS) program, UDLP was faced with a new program requirement
from Boeing to report on a weekly basis the progress of their production
process in terms of Earned Value. The Weekly Earned Value
Report (WEVR) was to document the feasibility of various infrastructure
requirements in place for the FCS program. UDLP, should it successfully
report Earned Value benefits on a weekly basis, would qualify for
$196,000 of additional revenue in the first six months of the Boeing program.
However, it was revealed that the company did not have the necessary
infrastructure in place to support the reporting requirements. One
major challenge was that data generation needed to document the elimination
of wasteful work being performed caused UDLP to miss the weekly
WEVR submission deadline. UDLP needed to significantly change the
ways in which it generated the report in order to successfully meet the
weekly deadline and qualify for the $196,000.
Implementation Highlights
The project to improve UDLP’s internal reporting processes began in May
2004 when a CMTC consultant interviewed management personnel to
understand the nature of the problem. Other key personnel involved in
the generation of the Weekly Earned Value Report were also interviewed.
After the interviews, a comprehensive diagram was developed to reflect the
flow of work that took place to generate the WEVR. Through the visual
representation of the work-flow process, the management team was able
to identify several key issues that were contributing to UDLP’s inability to
submit the report on time. Once these issues were identified, the project
team devised a root-cause analysis, which led to an improvement strategy
and plan to effectively submit WEVR consistently on schedule.
Improvement Description
The UDLP project yielded significant findings for improvement, including
identifying the cause for 69% of all data entry errors. Engineers were
provided the functionality to run an error report on their work, thereby
discovering and correcting data entry errors in real time. Users were given
opportunity to design new data entry screens to improve the input
process. The accumulation of these improvements drove data entry errors
down by 80%. The process of locating the responsible party and assisting
them in the correction of the errors, and then re-running the WEVR
improved significantly. This reduction in work enabled the remaining
work to be completed in time to generate and submit the WEVR on time.
Financial and Investment Impact
Once the new system is fully implemented UDLP expects labor requirements
for generating the WEVR to be reduced from 160 hours per week
to less than 8. This represents a $499,200 savings in annualized labor costs.
The ability of UDLP to now submit the WEVR on time each week enables
the company to qualify for the $196,000 Award Fee tied to this requirement.
Thus, the benefit of this project is valued by UDLP at $695,200.
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