Raytheon SAS Advanced Products Center, Dallas, Texas
Employees: 947, non-union
Total Square Footage: 342,000
Primary Product/market: Electronics for the U.S. military
Start-up: 1997
Achievements: On-time delivery of 98.2% for year-to-date 2009; met or exceeded internal goal of 95% first-pass yield at Microwave Automated Facility (MAF) for five straight years; ISO 9001:2000 and AS-9001A certification; 98% of workforce certified as R6s (Raytheon Six Sigma) specialists.
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The components and subsystems that Raytheon SAS' Advanced Products Center (APC) manufactures are used in sophisticated military radar and communications equipment, providing the "eyes" for the men and women of the U.S. military in the air, at sea and on the ground. For a helicopter pilot landing in a desert in the black of night, the performance of such equipment can mean the difference between life and death.
That's why Raytheon APC's three facilities -- two at the North Central Expressway campus in Dallas and one in nearby McKinney, Texas -- take pride in their ability to provide those soldiers with equipment that offers "no-doubt performance," explains Daniel Burke, director, APC operations.
"So they know that whatever part or device that comes from Raytheon is going to work the first time, every time," Burke says.
Ensuring reliability and quality is no easy task, considering that Raytheon APC specializes in manufacturing and designing complex technologies such as radio-frequency subsystems; microwave transmit/receive modules; specialty radomes; and interconnect substrates (which, according to Raytheon, are among the most difficult in the world to build).
Gary Hurst, enterprise improvement manager for Raytheon APC, sums it up this way: "We build things that other people can't build."
With its end users always in mind, Raytheon APC leverages lean tools, leading-edge technology and an empowered workforce to help meet its goals for more than 28 metrics measured by the facility. Those metrics include on-time delivery, customer satisfaction, scrap/rework, yield, cost and waste reduction.
In terms of the last two metrics, Raytheon APC estimates that it has delivered more than $160 million in cost savings to its customers over the last eight years -- thanks, in part, to waste-reduction efforts driven by lean principles. At APC's largest plant, the Microwave Automated Facility, for example, operators, quality-control personnel and test technicians are expected to generate at least five kaizen suggestions per year. (During a plant visit in November, MAF already had exceeded its goal of 760 kaizen submissions.)
