At a time when the services are looking to squeeze efficiency and effectiveness from every penny, the CH-47F helicopter “Team Chinook” produced some $400 million in savings from its first multi-year contract and was honored for it last week in San Diego.
Team Chinook, consisting of members of the Army CH-47F Product Office and manufacturer Boeing [BA], was awarded the 2011 Department of Defense Systems Engineering Top 5 Awards for the Chinook CH-47F Multi-Year 1 Program during the Oct. 26 National Defense Industry Association Award Luncheon in San Diego.
The DoD award recognizes the program’s successful implementation of systems engineering best practices, which in this case, resulted in about $400 million in savings.
“The greatest strength of this program is the commitment and dedication of this team to ensure that we get the best product that we can to the end user,” said Lt. Col. Brad Killen, product manager for CH-47F.
Under the Multi-Year 1 program, Team Chinook has delivered nearly 150 CH-47F Chinooks on time and on cost, and has trained and equipped seven Army units including those stationed in Hawaii and Germany.
Boeing now is working on a proposal for a second multi-year program.
Killen said that the team’s success is attributable to the total team approach in systems engineering, setting the standard and the foundation of collective collaboration and communication, a firm understanding of the requirements and program schedule by all stakeholders, and by ensuring that risks are mitigated early and addressed immediately.
“It’s not rocket science what we do here,” Killen said in a statement. “It’s just following defined processes, developing great relationships up and down the chain from our users in our Integrated Product Teams, and translating those to our vendors to ensure that all that input comes back under one team.”
Killen said the key is to start early and work toward an Integrated Master Schedule, identify risks involved and plan ahead to mitigate those risks. “It’s not just us doing engineering in a vacuum or in a stovepipe. It’s working with our users at Fort Rucker, it’s pulling folks in from the field, it’s getting information from our vendors and Integrated Product Teams (IPTs)–and then everybody working towards a common goal.”
As a large scale program, the CH-47F platform relies heavily upon supplier integration, the statement said. One of the major challenges on the CH-47F Multi Year 1 program was dealing with multiple suppliers and multiple IPTs managing those suppliers. “With two major primes, systems engineering had to be a top priority,” said Killen. Because the platform is so integrated, solutions must also be integrated and not isolated.
“We have to communicate,” said Killen. “When it comes down to hard decisions when we cannot do something, everybody has to come to the table and lay it all out.”