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Industry Lessons Learned and Application to Engineering Education

James D. Lang, Paul B. Hugge McDonnell Douglas Corporation

Significant change is taking place in the way aerospace products are designed and developed. These changes involve not just technology but represent some fundamental ‘Gre-engineering” of design and development processes. In addition, much of this “re-engineering” is representative of actions that are being implemented throughout all of U.S. industry. McDonnell Douglas Aerospace (MDA) has found that this new way of doing business has significant implications in the educational requirements for our techmcal workforce. These changes should be understood by universities and new working relationships must be developed, among industry, universities and governments.

Substantial and continuing reductions in government expenditures on military and space programs, increased global competition, and a downturn in commercial aviation sales, are the primary factors driving change in the product design and development process. These have forced the aerospace industry to focus sharply on reducing development time and producing higher quality, lower cost products that satisfy all customer requwements.

McDonnell Douglas Aerospace (MDA) has been learning from companies that have succeeded in creating high quality, reduced cost products within short time-to-market intervals. We are applying “Best Practices” from these successful companies to our high performance aircraft and missile product lines. One of the key finds of MDA’s implementation of “Best Practices” is a requirement for significant amounts of education and training in not only new tools and techniques but also in the processes we use to design, develop, and produce our products. Engineering education should also be modified to include these new fundamentals.

In the past, we had only partially integrated our product design and manufacturing processes. Additionally, the processes within both design and manufacturing had also been largely serial in nature. Each sub-process has been populated by engineering specialists. Initial designs were created and forwarded to these specialists for analyses of attributes such as weight, mechamcal integrity/strength and reliability/maintainability. The annotated designs were then returned for modification and update. This process was iterated several times until an acceptable design was created. Traditionally, this updated design was then forwarded to manufacturing specialists who established fabrication and assembly sequences and instructions, processing requirements, tooling requirements, design and fabrication of tooling, and quality assurance measurement and inspection requirements. The process has been lengthy and productiprocess changes originated at many points in the development path. In many cases, even though the product could be manufactured, time spans have been quite long and the products have suffered multiple defects.

~bg~~ 1996 ASEE Annual Conference Proceedings ‘.

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Hugge, P. B., & Lang, J. D. (1996, June), Industry Lessons Learned And Application To Engineering Education Paper presented at 1996 Annual Conference, Washington, District of Columbia. 10.18260/1-2--6107