Smoothing Tech Turbulence

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Smoothing Tech Turbulence
Updating and linking legacy systems is a challenge for aerospace companies

By Brian Gillooly
Issue date: Sept. 18, 1995

or three decades, the aerospace industry worked under a paradigm that promoted the proliferation of diverse computing platforms throughout an organization. And program-oriented information technology infrastructures materialized over the years as each government contract arrived.

Now, the industry's technology managers are spending a huge portion of their resources on integrating those platforms, and the push for a more homogeneous computing approach mirrors the unprecedented consolidation the industry is going through.

The integration of legacy systems is taking up the bulk of managers' time. "There is a forced and long-overdue integration of systems," notes Brad Stout, chief information officer and VP of information systems at Thiokol Corp. in Ogden, Utah.

"This has required us to reengineer around processes that were based on Defense Department mentality," adds Joe Cleveland, president of enterprise information systems at Lockheed Martin Corp. in Orlando, Fla. "As we do that integration, we're reengineering processes and moving to distributed systems."

Unix platforms, primarily from Sun, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM, figured prominently in that reengineering. But aerospace companies still rely heavily on big iron. "We aren't looking to abandon mainframes," says Stout. "The longer we keep them, the cheaper they are to own. That allows us to fund client-server technologies."

An example of how one aerospace company is linking its legacy systems with more current technology is Thiokol's manufacturing resource planning (MRP) system. Stout says Thiokol customized an off-the-shelf MRP package by writing 2.3 million lines of code to integrate it with the company's legacy systems. Thiokol integrated its electronic shop-instruction system with its shop-floor management system to distribute between the two engineering drawings, work instructions, and results of its work on shuttle booster rockets.

Another example is an electronic shop-instruction system that Thiokol put in place to automate the distribution and management of product drawings throughout the enterpr ise. It automatically captures product-design information and disseminates it to the correct departments to reduce the need for manual entry and distribution of information.

The company took Sherpa, a package from Sherpa Corp. in San Jose, Calif., that manages a database of images that are called for by the shop-floor system, and integrated it with the electronic shop-instruction system. "When we implemented the MRP at space operations, it reduced the total cost of operations by $350,000 a year," Stout says.

The system also will allow Thiokol to cut down on the 110,000 physical inspections it must make on rocket motors. By automating the process with terminals on the desktop, Thiokol can reduce physical inspections by 60% to 70%. "That's hundreds of man hours a month," says Stout.

Every day that aerospace companies go without integration, they leave valuable information laying wasted in millions of dollars worth of disparate systems. It's not unusual to have 10% of the IT work force sitting at ter minals grappling with how to take huge bodies of data that an engineering department has created and restating it for a manufacturing environment--usually preparing it for an entirely different platform.

Make Fighters, Not Toasters
"It takes 45 to 50 days to get a process change implemented on the shop floor," says Carleton Kilmer, managing partner of Andersen Consulting's industrial products practice in Boston. "In the meantime, manufacturing is making the wrong parts. The problem is, these people aren't making toasters, they're making fighters."

"We have to tackle all the traditional obstacles to integration," adds Mike Nocket, program director of product development architectures at Rockwell Information Systems in Seal Beach, Calif. "We have domestic and international standards that are not perfect. [And] we have a change in technology."

Throughout the 1980s, with the dramatic expansion of defense and commercial aviation, the emphasis was on productivity and capacity. Systems integ rators worked with some of the largest aerospace companies to document and integrate processes such as manufacturing and material and labor control to reduce obsolete material.

"The survivors did a pretty good job," says Andersen's Kilmer. The material control or-
ganizations were able to reduce work redundancies and obsolete materials by 60% to 70% with improved IT, he says.

Harnessing Skills
Still, the process hasn't been easy. Stemming that flow presented challenges for global enterprises like Rockwell. "We're highly diversified and have tremendous businesses all over the world," says Nocket. "The challenge is to harness those resources and direct them to new opportunities. We need to combine the skills of our electronics, automotive, and aerospace businesses."

Of course, much depends on how companies deploy technology to solve those problems. One wrong move, such as a poorly installed mainframe or an anemic client-server solution, can cost the company dearly. "IT can either be a great enabler or an insurmountable obstacle," says Nocket.

Until things began picking up last year, the aviation industry lost more money in the three previous years than it made in its entire history. That meant CIOs not only had to convince management of the need to continue investing in IT, but in some cases increase spending to gain a competitive edge.

"We've invested heavily in IT during this whole [slowdown]," says Thiokol's Stout. The company suffered a 40% decline in revenue from its propulsion division in the early '90s, but use of new technology was at an all-time high.

Thiokol's IT budget has actually come down over the past four years. The company spent $50 million on IT in 1991 and $33 million last year, but Stout attributes that to cost-cutting. Nevertheless, the company spent another $40 million over the past four years on a NASA-funded manufacturing program in its space operations division.

Having been hardened by the lean years, however, CIOs in aerospace are now relying more on case studies prior to making IT investments. "Those companies are fairly tight-fisted," says Waseem Sheikh, a managing consultant at EDS in Dallas. "They're not rushing to put in new systems unless they can be shown actual results first." Paul Hoedeman, CIO of AlliedSignal Inc.'s aerospace division in Torrance, Calif., agrees. "You still have to present a business case before you spend the money," he says.

With the bean counters looking over their shoulders, CIOs have to squeeze everything they can out of legacy systems. As integration frees up more money for investing in client-server architectures, a new paradigm is emerging, albeit slowly. Object-oriented development tools are coming into play, reducing the time and cost of software development. And, as new architectures make their way into these companies, so does a new generation of workers.

"You've got people now who are more adaptable to process reengineering," says Lockheed Martin's Cleveland. "They understand that client-server is th e interim step that will take us to object-oriented technology." Lockheed Martin is developing object-oriented databases, but does not have the development tools or processes yet to commit to it in a big way.

Aerospace IT officers say client-server architectures and open systems are widening the use of Unix applications on IBM, HP, and Sun workstations. No longer confined to product-design, Unix workstations are also being used for process management and database design. That's leading to greater use of object-oriented technologies.

At the same time, the move from centralized host systems to client-server architectures is presenting new technological obstacles, says Harry Meyer, project manager for strategic planning administration for Rockwell's IS division. "The conversion is a challenge, but client-server provides us with a better computing environment," says Meyer. The initiatives to standardize Unix environments will go a long way toward easing those difficulties, he says.

AlliedSignal is lo oking into using more third-generation graphics software in its engineering departments, and CIO Hoedeman says pilot programs the company ran last year showed a reduction of 30% to 70% in design tasks. "The customer feels it's necessary to have faster cycle times, so it makes sense for us," he says.

As the consolidation of companies such as Northrup and Grumman, Lockheed and Martin-Marietta continues, integration of disparate messaging systems becomes necessary. To that end, Lockheed Martin has begun pushing the X.500 standard across its enterprise. It's just one more example of how aerospace companies are using the latest technology to their advantage.

(To view the Aerospace/Engineering chart in PDF format click here)

Photo for InformationWeek By Katherine Lambert

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