DEVELOPMENT OF A FRAMEWORK FOR IMPROVING ENGINEERING PROCESSES

The complexity of designing products such as gas turbine components leads to enormous difficulties in understanding where the main design process inefficiencies are. It is extremely difficult to decide which improvements will have the most significant impact for a company or for a specific project. Another common issue found in the Aerospace industry is a consequence of basing a new gas turbine design on a previous concept which means that people generally don't question the overall design process. These issues, alongside a company's matrix organization, create difficulties in managing and improving the design processes. In order to overcome the mentioned problems, a framework has been developed and used in Rolls-Royce, aiming to assess and improve, in a systematic way, complex product development processes at component or system level. The framework involves the use of Value Stream Mapping (VSM) analysis to identify sources of waste in the design process, the use of Design Structure Matrix (DSM) to manage design iterations and complex interfaces, and process simulation to deal with its stochastic behavior and estimate and assess the benefit of potential developments.