ACHIEVING MISSION ASSURANCE - Raytheon

Processes
Design for Six Sigma: A Tool for Mission Assurance
at a System Level
When you mention
Design for Six Sigma (DFSS), you
think of tangible ideas — reduction
in parts count, elimination
of process steps and focus on
reliability of critical components.
These are important focus areas
at Raytheon that help us provide
our customers with better solutions
at lower cost, not only in
initial expenditure but also in
maintenance cost and downtime.
But this is not the only
application for DFSS.
At a system level, consider DFSS as designing
for Mission Assurance; employing
Raytheon Six Sigma TM techniques to ensure
that the system behaves as the customer
expects, and does not exhibit behaviors
that impede mission success. In pursuing
Raytheon’s Mission Assurance goal, we can
apply DFSS principles to a number of less
concrete facets of the system, including
abstract pre-implementation representations
of the system and the processes that
we use to create them. By employing DFSS
before physical design, we can leverage its
power to contain defects and enhance system
performance with a much smaller
investment of time and money. The projects
listed below exemplify the application of
these types of DFSS techniques. These projects
have been completed and documented
while others are currently underway.
National Test Bed Reachback
Project
In the National Test Bed Reachback Project,
Dale O. Brandt, Wayne O’Brien and Tim
Trapp of Intelligence and Information
Systems in Falls Church, Virginia and John
P. Kantelis of Integrated Defense Systems
used DFSS techniques, under the sponsorship
of Robert Keener, to enhance the
process for defining assertions describing
the behavior of an Advanced Battle
Management System. A more accurate and
complete set of assertions supports robust
architecture, enhances the ability to monitor
and correct behavior in safety-critical
systems and enables the development
of more thorough test scenarios for
the system.
Key Characteristics:
Identification, Implementation
and Maintenance Project
In this project, Tony Strickland, Debra
Herrera and Debra Childs of Raytheon
Missile Systems addressed the challenge of
focusing on those aspects of a system that
contribute most to mission success. This
project defines a process for describing
those characteristics of a system —
attributes, features or specifications —
that impact safety and compliance, or
critical performance. The project also
defines a method of identifying key
performance characteristics in system
documentation and controlling them
around nominal value to improve system
performance and reliability.
Closed-Loop Risk and
Opportunity Process Project
Nathan Schwendeman and his team from
Space and Airborne Systems proposed
refinements in processes, metrics and tools
to enhance an organization’s capability to
evaluate program progress based on technical
performance, cost and schedule.
Using input on cost, schedule and performance
risks or opportunities, this project
developed a common approach for programs
to make data-driven decisions that
are closed-loop to the program using DFSS
and other best practice techniques. This
allows the program to evaluate success
and offers an opportunity to better serve
customer needs in an efficient and profitable
fashion.
These projects represent just a few examples
of how DFSS processes and methods
can be applied to the development of systems.
All of our up-front processes, tools
and artifacts offer opportunities for applying
DFSS. Our challenge going forward is to
find and exploit high-leverage opportunities
to use DFSS tools in systems and software
challenges as well as in more traditional
applications.
Larri Ann Rosser
larri_rosser@raytheon.com
Raytheon Six Sigma is a trademark of Raytheon
Company. R6s is a Raytheon Company trademark
registered in the United States and Europe.
RAYTHEON TECHNOLOGY TODAY 2006 ISSUE 1 27