About Thales
Governments rely on Thales to protect citizens and make the world safer. From designing smart sensors and advanced defence systems, to developing collaborative combat, and connecting and equipping soldiers on the digital battlefield, our systems deliver information superiority and give joint forces mastery of action whenever they face their decisive moments.
The challenge
Back in 2007, Belfastâbased defence contractor Thales Air Defence faced a challenge. A leading global manufacturer of groundâtoâground, groundâtoâair, and airâtoâair missiles, the business had won a contract to partner with Swedenâs Saab Bofors Dynamics to produce shoulderâcarried antiâtank âNLAWâ missiles for the British Army.
However, two immediate problems posed themselves, explains Brian Abernethy, Head of Manufacturing at the company. First, the tender for the contract had been highly competitive, and margins were slim. Cost control, in short, would be critical. Second, the contract came with a traceability requirement in the shape of what were called âammunition data cardsââeffectively a full âasâbuiltâ record of the individual components going into every single missile produced.
Lean manufacturing initiatives had been in place at Thales for some time, says Abernethy. But the volumes involved in the new contract, and the tough cost targets involved, meant that the business would need to redouble its efforts around lean manufacturing and lowâcost, efficient flowlineâbased production.
The traceability requirement would be a tougher nut to crack. Not only couldnât the companyâs legacy MRP system deliver the required functionality, explains Abernethy, but at the volumes involved in the contract, attempting to deliver it manually would add prohibitively to headcount. On another missile contract, running at much lower levels of production, the task required two fullâtime product engineers, together with manual records and spreadsheets.
Serialising parts, and then scanning their barcodes, offered a foundation on which to build. But what was then required was a way of tracking the captured data and reporting it in the format that the customer wantedâand doing so efficiently.
âIn the short term, the focus was on capturing the build history, and delivering it to the customer in the required formatâwithout incurring nonâvalue added cost, and to do it in a way that didnât need expensive IT systems,â says Abernethy. âAfter that, the focus was on accelerating our lean activities.â
The solution
Coincidentally, a sister company, Basingstokeâbased Thales missile electronics business, had utilised MESTECâs âManufacturing Smart Boxâ terminals for quality management purposes. Talking to their colleagues at the company, Abernethy and his team realised that the MESTEC Manufacturing Smart Box system could meet their own traceability requirement, as well. But better still, from its position as a factory floor âsystem of recordâ, a MESTEC based solution could offer much more.
âWe quickly saw that MESTECâs functionality was much broader than weâd thought, and that we could use it to eliminate nonâvalue adding and nonâconforming activities,â he says. âFrom a lean perspective, it gave us data that we didnât have, in a format that we could use to drive improvement actions.â
The results
With missile deliveries scheduled for late 2008, implementation would need to begin immediately.
An early âwinâ, says Wilson Lenaghan, Thalesâ Work and Material Planning Manager, was a visit to another plant running MESTECâs Manufacturing Smart Box system, where the team saw the potential for barcoding workâinâprogress, and getting suppliers to barcode components.
âThe more we looked at how we were working, the more we saw the potential to change our manufacturing processes, and to move away from âkittingâ and instead adopt pullâbased systems,â he recalls. âMESTEC gave us the ability to link people to work centres,â adds Abernethy. âWhich not only gave us the ability to ensure that the people performing tasks were appropriately qualified and âcurrentâ, but also gave us logâon and logâoff times, from which we could capture manufacturing cost and efficiency metrics.â When the MESTEC system was integrated with the plantâs MRP system in 2010, explains Lenaghan, the act of loggingâon was then used to automatically trigger âbackâflushingâ through the bill of materials, with the old way of working completely replaced by pullâbased manufacturing and kanban squares.
âWhat began as delivering an âasâbuiltâ capability evolved into something far more transformational,â he says. âToday, itâs all about best practice in material flow, and eliminating actionsâsuch as kittingâthat donât add value.â
Abernethy concurs. âWithout doubt, we can demonstrate very real savings,â he sums up. âFrom capturing and reporting âasâbuiltâ data, to faster cycle times and improved material flow, weâre a business today that runs far more efficiently, thanks to MESTEC.â
Turn the clock forward to today, and Thales has now purchased additional licenses, in order to extend the MESTEC systemâs reporting and dashboarding facilities to a whole new set of employees. On one production line, the impetus has been the realisation that the MESTEC item genealogy report contained a wealth of information about individual assembliesâwho did what, when, and what the test results were.
Back on the NLAW line, lean manufacturing and the quest for efficiencies remain the driver, with MESTEC providing a rich source of data on actual vs. standard times and costs. âVia reports and dashboards, the system is delivering valuable actionable information, and Thales is wanting to extend the number of people who can access these insights and exploit them in their dayâtoâday roles,â sums up Jeremy Harford, MESTECâs Managing Director.
âWeâre finding this to be a common theme among our customers: even if they originally bought our solution for some other reason, such as traceability, the sheer power of its reporting functionality makes targeting efficiency improvements incredibly straightforward.â