The RASSP Digest - Vol. 2, 2nd. Qtr. 1995

Road to 4X

by Larry Scanlan and Leroy Fisher

1. Introduction

The RASSP Program has ambitious goals: 4X decrease in product development cycle-time, 4X decrease in life-cycle costs and 4X increase in product quality. Reaching these goals requires a map so we can choose the route that leads to the desired destination while avoiding financial mountains too high to climb or technology gaps too wide to jump. With the map we can expend all of our energy navigating the routes that will accelerate our progress.

In the sections that follow, the factors that contribute to cycle-time and quality will be identified along with the barriers to change. Next we describe some of the approaches being taken by the Lockheed Sanders RASSP team to address each of the factors and associated barriers. We will then summarize the results of a product development task analysis to show how each RASSP process reduces cycle-time and improves quality. Finally, we will assess the progress of the IRST Signal Processor Demonstration Team towards achieving 4X.

2. Contributors to Cycle-time, Cost and Quality

The fishbone chart shown in Figure 1 identifies the major factors contributing to cycle-time, cost and quality. Each will be described briefly in the following paragraphs.

Figure 1. Fishbone chart showing the significant contributing factors to cycle-time, cost and quality.

2.1 People

People represent a critical element in the quest for 4X. People make decisions, people apply expertise, people enable, people obstruct, people create, people destroy, and people drive the process. The inherent adaptability of people makes them indispensable to creative activities. At the same time, the capacity for independent function and innovative approaches, result in high levels of variability whenever people contribute to a process. To harness the creativity and minimize the variability, people need ready access to all the necessary facts and data, must be trained and must be empowered to make decisions and act on those decisions in an open and disciplined way.

2.2 Processes

Processes -- both business and engineering -- form an essential foundation to the establishment of predictable cycle-time, cost and quality. They must be defined, understood and institutionalized to be effective. The consistent application of process across the organization and across time reduces variability and, with suitable measurement, provides a systematic method for continuous improvement.

According to the Boston Consulting Group [1], "structural sources of competitive advantage such as ... low cost production ... or technology are no longer enough. Companies win by having business processes that recognize and meet customer needs fastest." Hammer and Champy in their book "Reengineering the Corporation" [2] cite several case studies where business process improvements and information technology have been combined to achieved results far beyond 4X. Clearly, process is an essential enabler in the quest for 4X.

2.3 Automation

Automation frees people to use their energy and creativity to solve problems and to continuously improve. However, as the saying goes, automating a bad process will only give you bad results more quickly. The science of knowing when and how to automate will be as important as the technology of automation.

Automation includes applications that accomplish single tasks such as logic simulation as well as infrastructure tools that enable communications, information management, process management and so on. It is sometimes useful to make the distinction between domain-specific applications and cross-domain applications where domains can represent specific engineering disciplines or organizational entities.

2.4 Information

Information and it’s re-use are vital for faster and better product development. Knowledge, the essence of information, must be easily preserved as it is created and even more easily made available when needed (re-use). Information includes rationale, metrics, product information, component information, process information, resource information, and market information to enumerate only a few of the many information categories.

The re-use of information keeps us from reinventing every time a new design problem comes up. To re-use something you have to have first captured the data. The more the collection of this data can be made either automatic or an easy part of working, the more complete will be the database for future re-use. Once captured, the information needs to be made available to the engineer or manager in a manner that makes re-use easier than starting over. When finding the information is perceived as more difficult than starting from scratch, the carefully captured information will have no value. The database and user interface must be robust and the search engine powerful to take advantage of re-use. The RASSP Design Environment can do a great deal in this area.

2.5 Management

Management represents the key decision-making element that can either make things happen or bog things down. Situational awareness, the ability to provide the right information at the right time, is a key enabler of the management function. Management is also a central force in institutionalizing processes and ensuring their consistent application.

Management is responsible for constructing plans and forecasts, for acquiring and allocating resources, for ensuring the growth of the people, and for making sure the business remains profitable. This authority means that management bears a large portion of the responsibility for the success or failure of the organization in reaching 4X.

2.6 Standards

Standards, while difficult to establish, have the capability for significantly accelerating product development. Standards for the representation of data make information sharing, re-use, and long term support across an entire industry easy.

3. Barriers to 4X

Change is difficult, and a number of barriers need to be overcome to accomplish our 4X objectives.

3.1 Cultural

Existing company and institutional cultures represent one of the most significant barriers to improvement. Cultural barriers exist in the form of resistance to change, overly localized perspectives, and reluctance to be measured.

3.2 Financial

Financial barriers hamper the ability of an organization to acquire new technology, to field new processes, and to train and motivate the workforce. Failure to plan for and invest in new design automation technologies, such as high speed simulators or VHDL-based design techniques, can result in longer development cycle- times, lower product quality and higher product costs.

3.3 Technological

Technology barriers can impede progress on both the product roadmap and on the process or operations roadmap. On the product side, these barriers inhibit or delay the introduction of new products. On the process side, desirable changes in the way activities are performed will be delayed because the supporting technology is not mature. For example, synthesis from Behavioral VHDL has not been widely available in the past and has limited the process options for top-down design.

3.4 Informational

Even if the culture supports change, the resources are there to finance it, and the technology is available on the shelf, information must be present to trigger necessary change. Situational awareness is a key element in supporting managed change in both process and product.

Lack of information, wrong information or poorly timed information can all contribute to inappropriate tactical and strategic decisions. Part of the information barrier is inadequate experience, poor or improper training and lack of awareness that help might be available. This results in re-inventing and re-learning rather than re-using.

4. Key Elements Leading to 4X Improvement

The Lockheed, Motorola, Hughes and ISX RASSP Team is developing a balanced set of approaches to address each of the factors that contribute to improvement and the barriers that impede improvement. This balanced approach involves developing new engineering and business processes and new technology as well as improving access to resources and information.

4.1 Top-Down VHDL Design

Top-down VHDL design forms the cornerstone of the product design process. It begins with development of VHDL models for entire systems and continues onto hardware/software partitioning and through detailed hardware design and development. These models comprise the Virtual Prototype(s) of the system and system elements.

Top-down VHDL design is most effective at compressing the timeline within distinct phases of design. Additionally, using VHDL as the carrier of product information and product intent significantly lowers the information barriers between design phases and provides a firm basis for supportability as a product is fielded. This significantly reduces the rate at which errors are introduced into the design, enables early integration of hardware and software and leads to reduced lifecycle costs.

Top-down VHDL design leads to higher product quality through the unbroken thread of product functionality from final design back to original requirements. In addition, early use of high-level VHDL models allows a larger design space to be explored and evaluated, enabling more informed trades between cost, time and function.

4.2 Structured Software Development

Structured software development complements the VHDL-based hardware design process, supporting hardware software co-design. The two together enable modular product design thereby facilitating design for re-use; the precursor to re-use of design.

Structured Software Development, like Top-Down VHDL Design, is most effective at compressing the timeline within distinct phases of design. And, like VHDL, the use of standard languages (Ada, for example) significantly lowers the information barriers between different phases.

4.3 Integrated Product Development (IPD) and Virtual Corporation Technology

Integrated Product Development teams have all of the disciplines needed to accomplish product development from concept to field support working as a single integrated team to efficiently and concurrently create new innovative products. The team approach enables tight linkages between hardware, software, product design, manufacturing, procurement, reliability, maintainability and supportability to be established and maintained.

IPD can be made significantly more powerful with the addition of tools and processes to enhance situational awareness. The RASSP Design Environment Prototype (RDEP), first shown at our six-month review and updated regularly since that time, incorporates several situational awareness tool concepts. Workflow management, process management, automatic notification and a common desktop environment are some of the tools that offer potential for making sure everyone has access to the facts necessary to make informed decisions. We are also developing methods to extend our situational awareness capabilities further and have plans for experimenting with several alternatives to assess their effectiveness.

Virtual corporation technology extends the concept of IPD to encompass multiple companies, geographically separated to perform as if they were a single company located in a single location. Virtual corporation technology allows the flexible creation of teams comprised of electronically co-located workers and addresses both engineering and management issues.

It includes these:

4.4 Re-use Databases and Libraries

Our RASSP Team recognizes the importance of re-use and re-use libraries. We are capturing the VHDL elements from the IRST Demonstration Model Year 0 in a database and will be demonstrating their re-use in Model Year 1. Our experiences will be valuable in assessing the additional requirements for easy re-use. We are also demonstrating how processes can be re-used by applying parts of the Model Year 0 process to Model Year 1. Because we learned a great deal during Model Year 0 and because Model Year 1 has added complexities such as legacy system considerations, the process has been refined and tailored to meet the needs of the next IRST Demo. Our experiences in trying to re-use process elements will further our insight into process re-use.

As with situational awareness, the RDEP has been used to capture our re-use concepts and to act as an interactive requirements tool. We are currently conducting user evaluations of the RDEP, including feedback on our plans for re-use databases and re-use libraries. This feedback combined with our actual experiences using the RDE during Model Year 1 will verify our approach and suggest ways to improve.

4.5 Rapid and Disciplined Process

The RASSP Rapid and Disciplined process features mechanisms that support overlapping, concurrent activities where information flow between activities is tagged with an estimate of its maturity. This methodology makes the sharing of in-process information easy but more disciplined than in the basic IPD structure. This enables down-stream activities to begin work, as appropriate, with preliminary information. The RASSP document management and product data management facilities have been designed to support a disciplined process of review and promotion.

4.6 New Technology Development and Adoption

The RASSP team is approaching new technology in several ways: Even without RASSP, technology growth will result in significant productivity improvements over the few years that RASSP is funded. We, however, are leveraging these "natural" advances to achieve dramatically better results much earlier.

5. Product Development Task Analysis

At the RASSP 18-Month Review held in El Segundo in February 1995, we presented a model for reaching 4X. This model was based on the results of a task analysis of the design process from very early system concept development and feasibility through development, test, production, and field support. Approximately 70 specific tasks were identified, and the associated duration, based on current practice, for each task was determined. The process flow was based on ADQAS (Advanced Design for Quality Avionics) [3] to insure a disciplined methodology with a high probability of yielding exceptional product quality.

The baseline development timeline resulting from the assignment of duration to tasks was compared with the current practice model proposed by Vijay Madisetti and Jack Corley of the RASSP Education and Facilitation team and found to fit easily within their minimum and maximum timelines as can be seen in Figure 2. To make an equivalent comparison, it was necessary to correctly align the starts of the two timelines. Our timeline began two phases earlier than the E&F current practice model. In addition, the E&F current practice model stopped with E&MD while ours included production and out-year supportability upgrade. This favorable comparison helped increase our confidence that we had accurately captured the basic product development process. The only anomaly occurs in the time assigned to Preliminary Design. The E&F current practice model assigns less time to this task than we do, probably because of differences in our definitions of when one phase ends and the next phase begins.


Figure 2. Comparison of Madisetti Current Practice Model and the Task Analysis Timeline.

We next applied the RASSP improvement elements discussed above to each of the 70 tasks to estimate how much reduction in task duration should result from the application of RASSP technology. In each case, an identification of which RASSP improvement elements were being applied and a rationale for why they should yield a reduction in cycle-time were codified.

Analysis of the task analysis data revealed three important conclusions: The data show that a three times improvement in cycle-time can be expected by applying RASSP improvements to individual tasks. Achievement of the full four times improvement requires integration of individual tasks using the RASSP Rapid and Disciplined process to achieve effective task concurrency. Figure 3 graphically shows the 3X and 4X reductions in cycle-time.


Figure 3. Within task improvements yield a 3 times improvement in cycle-time and the Rapid and disciplined Process applied across tasks provides the balance of the improvement to reach 4X.

An examination of Figure 3, reveals that some phases of the product development process are accelerated a great deal while others remain nearly the same in duration. In particular the Preliminary Design Phase takes nearly as long with RASSP as without. This is because the use of RASSP Top Down Design methods and Virtual Prototyping demand more work prior to PDR than the traditional methodology. However, the Detail Design Phase is substantially reduced because the Virtual Prototype has matured the design significantly. Similarly, the discipline and simulate-before-build-philosophy of RASSP make the E&MD Phase much shorter. This differs from a more traditional approach that allocates very large blocks of time to system integration and the correction of errors carried from the beginning of the design process.

Finally, we examined the data to determine which particular RASSP improvement elements were being cited most often and what proportion of the cycle-time reduction they contributed. Table 1 summarizes the top four improvement elements or factors. The largest contributor was Top Down Design using VHDL, which also includes Structured Software Development for programmable processing elements. This was expected and is consistent with the RASSP philosophy. Similarly, re-use was, as expected, an important contributor. Finally, team and management situation awareness was cited nearly as often as re-use and significantly more often than improved design automation tools. These data reinforce the observation that RASSP is not a tools program.

6. Progress toward 4X - IRST Image Signal Processor

The Model Year 0 IRST Image Signal Processor development, undertaken as part of the Demonstration portion of the program, provides the first measure of how we are progressing toward the 4X goal. A comparison with the achieved schedule and cost of the IRST Demonstration with a similar program bid by Hughes in 1993 reveals a 2.2X improvement in both measures. The achieved design quality, measured as first time integration success, was not as good as it was expected to be. Everything that was simulated using the Virtual Prototype worked the first time. However, integration time was impacted by the need to correct errors in portions of the design that had not been simulated. Integration time was, however, less than that typically associated with a design of this complexity. While quality, measured as fitness for use, was high when the hardware was delivered to the Aircraft, there is clearly room for the additional improvements in quality that will lead to near zero integration time.

7. Conclusions

The work described above provides a roadmap for the RASSP Program to follow as we continue the development of the Process and Infrastructure that will yield a four-times reduction in cycle-time and cost with an equal increase in quality.

REFERENCES

  1. Reengineering and Beyond,” Boston Consulting Group, 1993.
  2. M. Hammer, J. Champy, "Reengineering the Corporation: a Manifesto for Business Revolution", Harper Business, 1993
  3. Hughes Aircraft Company Radar Systems, McDonnell Douglas Aerospace, "Advanced Design for Quality Avionic Systems," March 1993
The RASSP Digest - Vol. 2, 2nd. Qtr. 1995

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