Open for Innovation: New Lockheed Martin Advanced Manufacturing Technology Center in Texas
Imagine being able to bring a concept to the production floor quickly. With the Advanced Manufacturing Technology (AMT) Center, that vision has now been expanded.
Recently, the Missiles and Fire Control (MFC) Production Operations team celebrated the grand opening of the AMT Center in Grand Prairie, Texas. The AMT Center is a collaborative, connected and flexible environment designed to enable rapid development and deployment of manufacturing technology solutions and training for teams. This technology drives product affordability and manufacturing agility across MFC facilities.
Addressing the urgent demand to adopt 1LMX, our mission-driven business and digital transformation program, innovate 21st Century Security® solutions and drive affordability, the MFC Operations team recognized the need for this space to develop, integrate and deploy emerging capabilities. By promoting greater technology commonality and accelerating replication, we can enhance flexibility in our factories and design approaches for the enterprise.
"The AMT Center will empower us to quickly implement critical changes on the factory floor by fostering collaboration among our Production and Advanced Manufacturing teams," Justin McKenzie, Grand Prairie Operations site lead, said. "Ultimately, this new space will enable us to remain cost competitive by improving our process variability, yield and manufacturing span time to exceed industry standards."
The AMT Center is developing and deploying the Future “Smart” Factory elements across the enterprise, serving as a sandbox and enterprise asset to develop, implement and mature new technologies, which can then be transitioned to the production floor. This proving ground approach reduces risk to our programs during the implementation of new capabilities into our high-rate production lines.
The MFC Production Operations team cutting the ribbon at the AMT Center grand opening.
In addition to serving as a testing ground for new technologies, the AMT Center will provide standardization, allowing for scalability and the elimination of multiple-point solutions. The space will also be used to share commonalities, best practices and capabilities across the enterprise.
“The AMT Center gives us the ability to accelerate concurrent engineering across the enterprise, where design and manufacturing engineers can collaborate in a physical space much earlier in the product development cycle to bring products to market faster that are producible at scale,” George Kaniamos, director of Operations Engineering, AMT and Transformation, said. “The manufacturing automation capabilities being developed in the AMT Center will also provide designers with a set of guidelines to drive manufacturing commonality and scalability across programs.”
To prepare the future workforce, the AMT Center provides training to our employees on the equipment prior to releasing it to production. The AMT Center also offers upskilling opportunities which target manufacturing engineers to support robotics and automation, data analytics and Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence.
A robotic deburr system using a Universal Robots collaborative robot to remove edges or burrs from machined metal parts.
Programs such as GMLRS are utilizing the space and have already taken advantage of its new capabilities. A collaborative robot that was recently developed helps manufacture part of the GMLRS rocket by picking up its heavy materials and loading them onto a machine with a push of a button. This was rapidly tested and implemented on the factory floor, all thanks to the AMT Center.
“The AMT Center allows us to own the development and become the experts of new technologies so we can support and sustain the technology once it’s on the floor,” Jamie Smith, Dallas Production Engineering senior manager, said. “We’re also equipped with offering a centralized inventory of solutions that demonstrates applicability to customer products in real-time.”
Additional work of the AMT Center aims to establish an integrated environment encompassing 1LMX tools, functioning as the pipeline for both engineering and development to drive expertise in the areas of design for additive manufacturing and design for automation. Additionally, the center will build the training pipeline and foster the growth of the Operations team.
An entrance to the AMT center in Grand Prairie, Texas.
“I am proud of the team for putting our vision into action. We have created a collaborative workspace to rapidly enhance our current production lines and to utilize our newer advanced manufacturing solutions early in our development programs,” Tom Carrubba, vice president of Production Operations, said. “The excitement and energy our team has in making our Future Factory a reality is allowing us to meet the needs of our customer’s evolving challenges.”