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Spotlights

Client: A Prominent Northwest Aircraft Manufacturer
Project: DCAC/MRM

Beginning in early 1994, well-known Northwest aircraft manufacturer initiated the Define and Control Airplane Configuration/Manufacturing Resource Management (DCAC/MRM) project to significantly streamline the processes and information systems used to produce commercial airplanes. The goals of this “landmark” initiative were to radically reduce costs, cycle time, and defects associated with the airplane design and manufacturing and to deliver more value to its customers.

As part of the streamlining of information systems, over 250 systems were to be consolidated into 4. Among many other changes, this meant that the data from the 250 legacy systems had to be extracted, transformed and loaded to the new systems in one of the largest data conversion efforts ever attempted. Beyond the challenges represented by the massive volume of data, the airplane build process as well as strict Federal Aviation Administration oversight dictated that the quality of the conversion be consistently and exceptionally high.

In 1996, ASIX brought its large-scale database and conversion experience to DCAC/MRM. Filling key roles as architects, analysts, designers, and developers, ASIX has made a notable and clear contribution to the success of the project. And after conversion of millions of parts, assemblies, modules, plans, operations, and airplane configurations for hundreds of delivered and forecasted airplanes, the first DCAC/MRM airplane rolled of the assembly line in February 2002. Our efforts now turn towards the completion of the remaining airplane models later in 2002.

ASIX’s Role:

• Led the data conversion requirements definition effort and the development of the complete functional architecture solution across the company (all sites in Washington and Kansas). This was the “blueprint” for the conversion of all airplane related data.
• Proposed and implemented an automated tool to validate the content and integration of the functional design documents. Translated the functional to physical architecture and developed the approach and standards for the data conversion implementation.
• Defined and incorporated extensions to the company development methodology to document physical designs and specifications.
• Designed and constructed a data transformation tool to generate programs to automatically convert legacy data for loading to new target systems.
• Created a batch program scheduling "Toolkit” to control the execution of all UNIX computer-based conversion processes. The “Toolkit” managed the automated processes of the conversion implementation.
• Developed data integrity checker tool to verify the correctness of the converted data.

Application Benefits:

• The functional architecture enabled all phases of the data conversion to complete on time and with no less than 99.6% data accuracy.
• The technical architecture and subsequent design refactoring reduced the data load time from 5 days to approximately 15 hours. This saved the company $10 – 12M per airplane model implementation (5 main airplane models are to be converted) in reduced production down time. It also gave management significantly increased flexibility in scheduling an airplane model implementation since automated and manual implementation steps could now be completed in a long weekend.
• The functional and technical design proved easily adaptable to changes encountered from phase to phase and airplane model to model. This reusability resulted in substantial development cost savings.

Methodology:

• The company adopted Productivity Plus methodology was utilized and, where necessary, extended, and enhanced by ASIX staff and others to suit the project needs.
• ASIX architects and analysts instituted requirements management standards and techniques to preserve and reuse deliverables across conversion phases.

Technology:

• EDS TeamCenter Enterprise (product lifecycle management (PLM) software; formerly Metaphase Enterprise product data management (PDM))
• Invensys ERP (formerly Baan ERP)
• Oracle 9i
• Perl
• Rational ClearCase

Partners:

• Oracle