Oklahoma City Weapons System Sustainment Conference

The first of a planned series of workshops was held In Oklahoma City, OK on 25 January 2007 in collaboration with OC-ALC, The Oklahoma Aerospace Alliance, and the Oklahoma Advanced Manufacturing Excellence association. The workshop was an outstanding success with over 120 attendees, including local resources of current NCMS members and many resources from local companies that are not NCMS members. One problem presented caught the immediate attention of the cross-service DoD sustainment community and is almost certain to appear as a highly ranked emerging project idea for CTMA funding.

NCMS plans to conduct a couple of these workshops per year, rotating the location to different locations of major DoD sustainment activities. The objective is to gather information on technology and/or process needs directly from the sustainment professionals directly responsible for day to day operations. These workshops differ from the annual CTMA Symposium in that needs are presented by sustainment resources very near the problems presented but unlikely to attend the CTMA Symposium. This conference also differed in the level of collaboration with local trade associations, which was a key factor in reaching the greatly broadened audience.

CTMA Project Seeks Participant: Assembly Design & Documentation, Phase II

The Assembly Design and Documentation project targets the development of a system that, working from a 3D model of an assembly plus product data and requirements configuration managed by the Teamcenter Product Lifecycle Management system, can automatically determine a collision free assembly/disassembly sequence, create high quality graphical animations of the process, and links to a powerful work instruction authoring system. The basic functionality was developed in Phase I, which was completed in December 2006. The team is now defining the objectives and work breakdown structure of a planned Phase II project which will add new functionality of interest to both OEMs and the sustainment community. For example, when a full kit of parts isn’t available, a user will be able to identify the parts on hand and ask the system to plan how far assembly can proceed without creating a situation where addition of a part on hand creates a blocking situation for one of the missing parts. A user will also be able to select a part in the 3D assembly model and ask the system to plan a partial disassembly that enables access to the selected part.

One new participant is planned for addition to the Phase II effort. The project is open to others for now but the window of opportunity is closing. For more information, contact Tony Haynes at (734) 995-4930, tonyh@ncms.org.