Network-Centric Manufacturing

Doyle Center for Manufacturing technology Links DOD, OEMS and small Manufacturers

By Tim Hayes, Contributing Writer

Imagine you're a small manufacturer. What would your dream customer look like? Huge in scale and scope? Offering a seemingly endless stream of new ideas requiring your products and services? Looking primarily for domestic suppliers, so the threat of losing business to offshore competitors is essentially removed? And guaranteed to never, ever go out of business?

Well, stop dreaming. That customer exists and is hoping to find a business just like yours. It's called the United States Department of Defense (DoD). But there is one little hitch. There are about a million other businesses trying to get in through the same doorway as you, all at the same time, and many with strikingly similar capabilities. What's a small manufacturer to do?

A solution is on the way from the Doyle Center for Manufacturing Technology, a federally funded program currently developing and testing a promising solution to bridge the gap between the DoD, its large prime contractors (OEMs) and small manufacturers. It is an innovative Internet-based suite of tools that can be used to manage traditional supply chains or to create and manage a collaboration of complementing small suppliers. This is what the Doyle Center calls creating a network-centric manufacturing enterprise.

Working out of the Pittsburgh Technology Center, the Doyle Center is moving into the beta testing phase, testing the tool suite in a real-world pilot project with some of the major Defense Department contractors.

“The Department of Defense represents a huge and somewhat captive market, because of the nature of products and their end use,” said Dennis Thompson, Executive Director of the Doyle Center. “Since there are typically low product volumes for much of the DoD's requirements, it is relatively unattractive for the larger domestic manufacturers, thereby creating new opportunities for small manufacturers. Because of these issues and others, it makes the DoD a great place to test a new concept like network-centric manufacturing.

“Setting up a facility like the Doyle Center would have been difficult to do through venture capitalists channels, because of the high level of the time and cost involved in developing the model,” he said. “The Congressman really is a visionary, in seeing the potential to help the small manufacturing community, and in taking the initiative to sponsor such a major undertaking.”

The Congressman to whom Thompson refers is U.S. Rep. Mike Doyle, a Democrat serving the 14th Congressional District, which includes Pittsburgh and its surrounding communities.

In 1998, Doyle became concerned about the demise of the steel mills and the impact on the local manufacturing community. Doyle helped to secure funding through the Defense Department's Manufacturing Technology Program to institute the Technology Insertion Demonstration and Evaluation (TIDE) program, which at that time was managed at Carnegie Mellon University. In June 2003, the program moved to its current location and was renamed the Doyle Center for Manufacturing Technology.

“One of the main problems was that small manufacturers were falling behind large manufacturers in terms of their use of technology,” Thompson said. “We went to Congressman Doyle with an alternative idea, to produce a suite of tools and to make it available on the Internet, so that small manufacturers could have an affordable, technology-based solution that would allow them to better interface with large manufacturers.”

The Congressman committed to supporting funding for the Doyle Center for five years, with the goal of the Center achieving self-sustaining status by the end of that period.

“Imagine this as a new model for manufacturing and supply chain management,” said Thompson. “A new model is needed, because OEMs are continuing to push more and more manufacturing down the supply chain, moving in a direction where in many cases they will be only a system integrator, assembling, testing and shipping the end product. As this trend evolves, the manufacturing base eventually will move into the hands of small manufacturers.”

In anticipation of this trend, the Doyle Center is creating and testing a proof-of-concept model for network-centric manufacturing, defined as a “loosely coupled enterprise, which is formed by many partners (whole or parts of real companies), enabling them to operate more efficiently and effectively, as if it is a single global enterprise to fulfill a specific mission.

“We're still in the stage of testing and refining our suite of network tools, using pilot projects in real world applications like the one with Lockheed Martin missiles and fire control,” he said. “In this project, we worked with a three-man engineering company to create and simulate a manufacturing process and supply chain made up of eight small manufacturers to produce a turbine engine for a new missile program. We successfully demonstrated to the Army, the Air Force and Lockheed Martin that they could be a viable supplier of engines.

“Working with major defense contractors is an important first step to get us where we originally wanted to go, which is to create a model where small manufacturers with access to the right technology tools can come together to collaborate in an extended network to successfully compete for and win contracts in the defense industry,” Thompson explained.

The Doyle Center also hopes to connect with the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) where most defense manufacturing contracts originate.

The DLA is one of the DoD's key entry points, and it is an excellent place to test an expanded version of our model to create a short order solution for manufacturing hard-to-source and out-of-production parts. The agreement could include providing services to engineer and produce those parts, said Thompson.

“This could be huge for local small manufacturers,” he said. “Once we prove the model works, we would be doing significant work for the DLA that could potentially extend to other industry segments. This will be a national program, but we want to work first in our backyard.

“When you look at the big picture, manufacturing in the late 1960s was 30 percent of the gross national product, and today it's 14 percent. Projections say that percentage will be cut in half again over the next 10 years, which would move this country into third-world status in terms of manufacturing,” said Thompson. “Of the 350,000 manufacturers in the U.S., more than 95 percent are small manufacturers, who must deal with increasing global competition and rapidly changing technologies.

“That's why we really started all this, to find opportunities to help these small manufacturers and get this situation turned around,” he said. “If what we're doing helps people think out of the box and try a different approach, then that's good. Longer term, we hope to be part of the national strategy for a strong domestic manufacturing future.”