It's estimated that it costs $100,000 per day just to pay for the standing army needed to launch a military satellite into space. And you thought gasoline was expensive.
With those kinds of dollars at stake, the last thing any aerospace contractor wants is a costly launch delay caused by a last-minute scramble to locate assembly, quality, or testing documentation.
Until fairly recently, however, the Advanced Information Systems (AIS) unit of $27.2 billion aerospace giant General Dynamics Corp. and its customers were all too exposed to just such delays. That's because, as at many aerospace manufacturers, documentation of critical quality, testing, non-conformance disposition, and other production-related processes was largely paper-based at the unit, whose Scottsdale, AZ, plant makes, integrates, and tests printed circuit boards and other electronics for military satellites. Even an electronic component the size of a cigarette pack could generate five or six boxes of paper documentation. On the plant floor, where work instructions also were paper-based, documentation occupied 77 four-drawer file cabinets.
In some cases, when documentation could not be found, a completed subsystem would have to be torn down, reassembled, and retested, at an average cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars in rework and delays.