Virgin Orbit Takes Off on Production: An iBASEt MES/Quality Customer Success Story

Virgin Galactic may be the best known of the Virgin Group’s aerospace ventures, having captured the imagination of both the public and media for its development of commercial spacecraft, particularly its goal of providing suborbital spaceflights to tourists. For the business world, what may be the most interesting part of the Virgin Group portfolio of companies may be the newest: Virgin Orbit, a Long Beach, California-based organization focused on launching satellites for commercial, research, and governmental projects. In a recent issue of The Verge, Dan Hart, CEO of Virgin Orbit, stated, “To me, the Virgin brand is about making life on Earth better, and we are going to fulfill that purpose by accessing Low Earth Orbit to connect billions of people and enabling valuable applications of data from space through Virgin Orbit’s flexible, affordable, and reliable launch service.” The first iteration of this vision is Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne program, an initiative that will launch small satellites from under the wing of a 747 airplane. The program is comprised of two vehicles: The LauncherOne rocket and The Cosmic Girl 747-400 plane.

The challenges of a discrete complex manufacturing operation like the one at Virgin Orbit are significant. The processing of engineer to order, and multiple bill-of-material levels can go very deep. Work-in-process units incorporate engineering changes as the process progresses, and engineering must be involved in material review processes, dispositions, and rework instructions every step of the way. As-designed equals as-built validation is required, as is traceability of changes, deviations, and approvals. It’s a complicated business that requires a complete solution. The LauncherOne team at Virgin Orbit selected iBASEt’s MES Solution, powered by Solumina, to address a host of needs, including: Paperless work instructions, Real-time visibility, Synchronization and control of production operations, Quality management and corrective actions, Shop floor change management, Data collection, buy off, and certifications, Execution of real-time, physical processes, Work order completion management, Integration, coordination, and execution of work orders with Virgin Orbit’s ERP (Oracle) and PLM (Teamcenter) systems.

To achieve these objectives, iBASEt’s MES Solution was deployed, including Process Planning, Shop Floor Execution, and Shop Floor Quality functionality were deployed with no configurations. “We had been working in a paper-based environment that was both labor- and time-intensive,” says Darren Buonaguidi, project manager for the LauncherOne team. “A technician on the shop floor would have to read the work instructions, and often supplemental information, and then go to different places on the floor to get everything they needed. There were usually many steps, involved; often the accessed information was in Excel spreadsheets or other paper forms. Solumina provides the work instructions in one place, an easy-to-access and understand screen. Then it not only collects and presents all the relevant information, but automatically incorporates engineering changes and manages exceptions. In a complex environment like ours, the speed of reaction to exceptions is critical; Solumina enables quick response.” To speed understanding and adoption of this solution, iBASEt gave targeted implementation workshops to LauncherOne’s core implementation team on each of the functional areas that included the basics of each area with best practices coaching, as well as a framework for business process transformation and execution/utilization for LauncherOne manufacturing. “This knowledge was passed on very successfully to the team at large,” reports Andrzej Goryca, enterprise application manager at Virgin Orbit. “Communication with the entire team was essential to the ramp up, as was making sure everyone knew they were an important part of the team. The commitment we had from our top-level leadership also helped us get up to speed fast.” Buonaguidi adds that the application itself helps with training the staff. “Solumina is well thought out, so when team members have questions, the answers are at hand in the OOB Solumina,” he says. “Its capabilities are really complete.” Virgin Orbit team has done a great job managing business requirements and asking the “why” question each time a customization was being requested.

• Virgin Orbit went live with their iBASEt solution in four months – a month and a half ahead of their initial plan. This was accomplished significantly under budget, thanks to the Virgin Orbit support team performing a considerable amount of implementation tasks (i.e., the entire scope of integration). The iBASEt solution also contributed, enabling a quick roll-out by a feature-rich, well defined, and documented set of setup functions.
• The manufacturing execution encompasses the following capabilities: Integrates with ERP jobs/work orders and financial modules, with interfaced information visible, actionable, and reportable in the target systems. Provides material status and labor status (i.e., inputs and outputs) to Oracle to calculate costs (i.e., time and material) against work orders. Integrates with PLM and ERP to exchange BOM, router, resource, and work order information. Manages, dispatches, and displays jobs/work orders to technicians, including visual aids management. Provides step-by-step work instructions and visual aids to technicians. Indicates clearly all materials and parts required for the work order. Displays and enforces second-party verification on build steps, as designed in the manufacturing process. Captures labor hours spent for the build against work orders (WIP and final assembly). Manages work order non conformances within the system. Assists, captures, and maintains ad-hoc build processes. Empowers users to create ad-hoc jobs/work orders to capture materials and hours against rework, upgrades, or re-grades. Captures genealogy of components and assemblies built via lot and/or serial trace abilities. Reports on as-built configuration of a component or assembly, including removing and replacing. “Redlines” work orders on the shop. Lists and reports shop floor data (e.g., torque values, temperature readings, counts, measurements) via user input. Provides visual tools to manage predecessor/successor relationships between operations. Collects and reports on all as-planned, as-built, and as-maintained data.
• “This is a very powerful system that is especially impressive when considering we didn’t have to do any configurations for the primary implementation,” says Goryca. “That not only speeds time-to-value, but it keeps the costs down.” According to Buonaguidi, immediate plans are to leverage their solution as it is now implemented, with an eye towards adding further functionality over time. So, the sky’s the limit—but that is something that Virgin Orbit knows very well.

• Virgin Orbit went live with their iBASEt solution in four months – a month and a half ahead of their initial plan.
• This was accomplished significantly under budget.