Using Virtual Business Systems to drive lean behavior in engineering design and support

Virtual Business System (VBS) is a visual-based analytics and real-time information displaying system. It first started at Raytheon's Andover manufacturing facility in early 2000 with the strategic objectives of linking Lean and Six Sigma behavior to customers' successes and gradually transforming Raytheon into a Lean workplace. VBS dashboards are projected onto flat screen panels located throughout the factory floor such that anyone on the floor can view the production line status in real-time. This thesis focuses on developing a new VBS dashboard and using it to transform the enterprise. Leveraging the success in manufacturing deployment, this thesis describes Raytheon's initial attempt of extending VBS to the engineering arena, with the goals of driving Lean and Six Sigma behavior to the next level, transforming problem solving behavior from reactive to proactive and from containment to prevention, redefining quality control and performance metrics to better reveal business risks and opportunities and eliminating undesirable aspects in cost, cycle time and information latency. The VBS dashboard described in this thesis provides root cause "drill-down" capabilities for quality control and performance assessment, which leads to cycle time reduction, early stage problem resolution and defect prevention. VBS changes data ownership culture from privatize to publicize, which couples employees' actions to responsibilities and enhances proactive problem solving attitude. VBS dashboard is also a one-stop shop for data collection and analysis, which eliminates non-value added work for processing and fetching data from multiple sources. Last but not least, VBS dashboards build on modular development architecture, which enables quick turnaround on deliverables.

Department dc:contributor.department

Sloan School of Manufacturing.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2008

Author dc:creator

• Ho, Purdy P. (Purdy Pinpin), 1977-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Deborah Nightingale and Roy E. Welsch.

• Engineering Systems Division.
• Sloan School of Manufacturing.
• Leaders for Manufacturing Program.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/43862

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/43862