Inside Lockheed Martin's New Advanced Manufacturing Centre

Lockheed Martin, the aerospace and defense leader announced the grand opening of a new Advanced Manufacturing Technology (AMT) Center in Grand Prairie, Texas. 

Celebrated by its Missiles and Fire Control (MFC) Production Operations team, the center is designed to enable rapid development and deployment of advanced manufacturing technologies. 

In a connected, flexible and collaborative environment teams will receive expert training and drive innovation across Lockheed Martin's offerings. 

Designed for 1LMX adoption

The development of this new AMT technology centre has been partly driven by Lockheed Martin's need to adopt 1LMX. 

1LMX, is the manufacturers mission-driven business and digital transformation program. This program is designed to innovate 21st Century Security solutions and increase the affordability of operations.

The MFC Operations team identified the need for a space where 1LMX could be effectively developed, integrated and emerged with pre-existing systems. 

Through accelerating replication and increasing technology commonality, this centre is helping to enhance flexibility and design approaches throughout Lockheed Martin's factories. It will serve as a testing ground for new technologies, helping to scale and standardise them whilst eliminating multiple-point solutions. 

Ultimately, the AMT centre will help to boost capabilities, best practices and technological enterprise across the enterprise and the aerospace sector.

"The AMT Centre will empower us to quickly implement critical changes on the factory floor by fostering collaboration among our Production and Advanced Manufacturing teams," said Justin McKenzie, Grand Prairie Operations site lead.

"Ultimately, this new space will enable us to remain cost competitive by improving our process variability, yield and manufacturing span time to exceed industry standards."

A sandbox & enterprise asset 

The AMT Centre has been designed as a sandbox and enterprise asset, to mature and experiment with new technologies. 

These include future smart factory elements, which will then be transitioned to the production floor.

Through this approach Lockheed Martin is ensuring new capabilities can be seamlessly integrated into high-rate production lines, reducing the risk of disruptions to vital programmes.

Programs such as GMLRS, which focuses on developing munitions capacity through rockets and missiles capable of precision-strikes are already using the space. 

Recently a collaborative robot was developed to help manufacture parts of the GMLRS rockets. The robot loads heavy materials into a machine with a push of a button and is the result of rapid testing and innovation that happened at the centre. 

“The AMT Centre allows us to own the development and become the experts of new technologies so we can support and sustain the technology once it’s on the floor,” says Jamie Smith, Dallas Production Engineering senior manager.

“We’re also equipped with offering a centralised inventory of solutions that demonstrates applicability to customer products in real-time.”

“The AMT Centre gives us the ability to accelerate concurrent engineering across the enterprise, where design and manufacturing engineers can collaborate in a physical space much earlier in the product development cycle to bring products to market faster that are producible at scale,”  adds George Kaniamos, director of Operations Engineering, AMT and Transformation.

“The manufacturing automation capabilities being developed in the AMT Centre will also provide designers with a set of guidelines to drive manufacturing commonality and scalability across programs.”

Upskilling the future workforce

The AMT Centre also provides vital training to Lockheed Martin employees, increasing their expertise on new equipment and solutions prior to it being released into production. 

The centre offers upskilling opportunities to engineers which support their ability to work with robotics and automation, data analytics and Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence.

Lockheed Martin aims to create a fully integrated environment that functions as a pipeline for both engineering and professional development, with a specific investment in driving automation innovation and additive manufacturing design. 

“I am proud of the team for putting our vision into action," says Tom Carrubba, Vice President of Production Operations at Lockheed Martin.

"We have created a collaborative workspace to rapidly enhance our current production lines and to utilise our newer advanced manufacturing solutions early in our development programs.

"The excitement and energy our team has in making our Future Factory a reality is allowing us to meet the needs of our customer’s evolving challenges.”

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